


long is the road (that leads me home)

by blanketed_in_stars



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Assets & Handlers, Gunshot Wounds, HYDRA's evil plans & machinations, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Rescue Missions, Road Trips, Sharing a Bed, Steve Rogers as the Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:13:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 50,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27965861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blanketed_in_stars/pseuds/blanketed_in_stars
Summary: In 1945, Steve Rogers falls off a train in the Alps. In 2014, he pulls Bucky out of a river and vanishes. Three months later, he reappears. Bucky figures there’ll be enough time, between taking out HYDRA cells across the continental US, to convince Steve he’s not his old handler. But as the standard job turns into a rescue mission, both of them are forced to ask: who have they become after seventy years as soldiers? And now that they’ve found each other again, who do they want to be?Written for Marvel Trumps Hate 2019.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov & Sam Wilson, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanov & Sam Wilson
Comments: 19
Kudos: 60
Collections: Marvel Trumps Hate 2019





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ZepysGirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZepysGirl/gifts).



> Well, folks. I started writing this in earnest in February 2020 and it has kept me company through one of the longest years on record, and I’m so glad to finally share it with y’all.
> 
> Some thanks are in order:
> 
> Thank you to ZepysGirl, the bidder who asked for this fic and whose enthusiasm has kept the story alive all these months! This story would not exist without you, of course, but it would have turned out vastly differently without your patience, encouragement, and trust. I’m so grateful to have written for you and to have got to know you a bit in the process! I hope this work brings some joy to the end of your year :)
> 
> Thank you to Audrey, my beta and best friend, who insists that the work is its own reward but should really be paid for her efforts. Audrey, you never gave up on me or this story, not even when times have been tougher than they have any right to be. 1.5 rewrites and you still hung in there, offering advice and objectivity and holding my hand sometimes step by step—and I’m so grateful. There really aren’t words to thank you for your support, but I figure you know <3
> 
> And thanks to my family for giving me the space to write this thing over and over again and for not telling me to can it after the fifth re-hashing of the same plot holes. My family won’t read this, but I want y’all to know that they could’ve shaken their heads at me for this but they never, ever did.
> 
> You can also find me on [tumblr](https://blanketed-in-stars.tumblr.com). Come say hi!
> 
> Title from the song "Cold Is The Night" by The Oh Hello's.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story as a whole has content warnings for graphic violence, mentions of torture, and depersonalization. It’s also a hurt/comfort story, but there’s a lot of hurt before the comfort shows up. Shoot me an [ask](https://blanketed-in-stars.tumblr.com) or a comment if you have questions, and take care of yourselves.

what if a keen of a lean wind flays  
screaming hills with sleet and snow:  
strangles valleys by ropes of thing  
and stifles forests in white ago?  
Blow hope to terror; blow seeing to blind  
(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)  
\--whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,  
it's they shall cry hello to the spring

— e.e. cummings, _what if a much of a which_

**APPROX. LOCATION: KOSCIUSKO, MISSISSIPPI**

Bucky had expected—a bullet between the eyes, or a gun to his head at least. But Steve stands across the room from him and tosses his weapon away, letting it clatter on the concrete floor. His eyes are clear and calm.

“Steve?” Bucky feels winded just saying his name.

Steve doesn’t move. “Reporting for duty,” he says.

Bucky blinks. Words pile up on his tongue, so many it’d take years to say them all, shock and fear and hope colliding inside him so forcefully he’s surprised he’s able to stay standing. And on top of it all—he looks around, takes in the carnage around them, the bodies and the broken furniture. “You cleared the base?” he asks finally.

A hint of doubt enters Steve’s eyes. “They would have killed you,” he says, “if I didn’t.”

“You—” Bucky forces his voice not to tremble. He tries to keep a firm check on his own joy, on the warm relief that surges through his chest. He swallows it down as best he can. “You know who I am?”

Steve nods. “Your name is Bucky,” he says. “You were my first handler.”

It takes a moment for the words to hit, but they do, with a sickening impact and a long, long silence. Bucky opens his mouth and closes it again. He shakes his head. “No, Stevie, I’m—I’m your best friend. I’ve known you since we were kids.”

The corner of Steve’s mouth twitches, and it takes Bucky a moment to realize that it’s a smile, or something close to one. “They’ve updated my protocols,” he says. “No one calls me that anymore.”

There’s something crumbling inside Bucky, in some deep place he didn’t expect, where he didn’t know there was anything left to break. He steps forward, through the blood, until Steve’s close enough to touch. “But you remember,” he says, more pleading than asserting. “You remember when I did call you that.” There’s blood in the grooves of his metal hand, Bucky sees, dirt in his tangling hair.

“I—I remember—” Steve drops his gaze to the ground, frowning, then looks back up. “You were always there. You were my handler.”

“Friend,” Bucky insists.

Steve flinches, though Bucky hasn’t moved any closer. “Okay,” he repeats quickly, “friend.”

Bucky takes in the way he’s standing, tensed as if expecting a blow, the way his eyes have gone blank again, like a mask. It hurts to look at him. Hurts to hear him say “friend” like the word is a shield, with no belief behind it. “I’m not gonna hurt you,” he says, as gently as he can, the effort it takes astonishing. His words echo off the concrete. “I’m just trying to tell you that I don’t—that you don’t belong to me.”

“I don’t understand,” Steve says. He sounds, for the first time, frightened.

It nearly tips Bucky over the edge, but he bites his tongue hard and tries again. “I’m not your handler,” he says.

He sees the words reach Steve, but there’s no burst of clarity, not even a flicker of acceptance. It’s like running into a wall. “But I know you,” he says. “I don’t—I don’t know anyone else.”

Bucky holds his gaze a moment, chewing the inside of his cheek, then turns away. He picks up the gun that Steve threw aside and wipes it on his sleeve. “What about your last handler?” he asks.

“Pierce,” Steve confirms, quiet, something indecipherable in the name. “I knew him. But he’s dead.”

“What about the rest of them?” Bucky asks, turning back to Steve almost against his will, tucking the gun into his belt. “You took your orders from them, last time I checked.” He isn’t sure where the savagery comes from, sharp as a knife-point, only that he can’t seem to stop it, that the alternative would be unconscionably worse. He wonders if Steve will kill him if he presses far enough.

But there’s no coldness in Steve’s eyes as he gazes back at Bucky. None of the ferocity he had in D.C., only a keen focus. “They broke protocol,” Steve tells him.

Bucky waits, but there’s nothing more. “And—what, you just—don’t listen to them anymore?”

Steve shakes his head. “They told me to sabotage my handler,” he says. “Direct violation. So I left.”

Bucky supposes “my handler” is meant to refer to him, but he ignores it this time. Arguing hasn’t seemed to help so far. “And you went looking for me,” he says slowly. “Why?”

Steve doesn’t drop his eyes. “I didn’t know where else to go,” he says. “I didn’t know—what else to be.”

There’s that hint of fear in his voice again, tearing at Bucky in a way he remembers. He’s surprised, faintly, that he does still remember. “What are you?” he asks, steeling himself against it.

“I’m the Asset,” Steve says, but he doesn’t look it. He’s covered in gore, the blood still wet, and yet—he looks almost small, standing there, gazing at Bucky in expectation, in some twisted imitation of hope. “I’m yours.”

———

“So, this is fucked up,” Natasha says as they round the bend away from the base, angling through the trees in the direction of the road. There’s a curious kind of stillness at this hour, the night noises fading but the birds not yet awake, and her words sound too loud in the quiet.

Bucky glances over at her, startled out of his own thoughts; she’s barely said a word in the last hour beyond confirming that the base is empty, opting instead for watching Steve through narrowed eyes and keeping one hand on her gun. Bucky can’t say he blames her, but he’s surprised it’s him she asked to come get the car and not Sam. “You’re telling me.”

She snorts without humor. “You’re not going to want to hear this,” she says, “but it’d be safest to just put him down.”

“Put him—” Bucky chokes on the words, horrified, enraged. Guilty. “He’s not a _dog,_ Romanoff, he’s my friend.”

“Your friend who was brainwashed for decades into trying to kill you,” she returns, without any particular malice. “And he almost succeeded. Your friend who was the best tool HYDRA has ever had?”

“They forced him,” Bucky says, “it was all under duress. You know that.”

“I know,” she says. “But that kind of conditioning doesn’t wash out very easily. You can’t just—swap one leader for another and expect him to forget everything he learned.”

“I’m not his leader,” Bucky says quickly; he doesn’t like how she states it as if it’s a given. “And anyway, isn’t that what you did?”

“And look how well that turned out.” There’s a bitter smile on her face when she catches his eye, but it fades quickly. “My point is, they trained him to be a weapon, and that’s what he is.”

Bucky opens his mouth, but he can’t quite bring himself to respond. He sees, ahead, the bumper of the car sticking out from between the trees, the brown tarp hiding it well enough from anyone who doesn’t know it’s there to begin with. When they reach it, he pulls the tarp off, trickles of pre-dawn dew dripping onto his boots. “I don’t know,” he says, folding the tarp and putting it in the trunk. “He was able to stop on the helicarrier. He saved my life.”

Natasha, in the front seat, is silent for several moments. Then the engine sputters to life, filling the air with its rumbling. Bucky considers repeating himself more loudly, but stays silent; he thinks maybe it’s better if she didn’t hear it. He throws their bag of confiscated files into the trunk on top of the tarp.

Leaving the engine running, Natasha walks back to the trunk and unloads the weapons they took from Steve, as well: a grenade, four knives, two pistols. “Let’s go relieve Wilson,” she says, shutting the trunk. Bucky gets into the passenger seat and waits as Natasha looks in both directions down the empty highway. He isn’t sure how to continue their discussion, uncertain of what will convince her, if anything can. But she glances at him as she eases the car onto the road, headlights off, and says, “You don’t know who pulled you out of that river.”

Bucky stifles a sigh. “It was him,” he says. He hears her softly dismissive _tsk_ and frowns. “It’s not like I could’ve done it myself,” he says. “You think—”

“Humans are capable of astounding things under stress,” she responds. They take the curve slowly. “But even if it was him,” she continues, heavily, into the silence, “he left you there. Where’s he been for the last three months? What’s his reason for showing up now?”

There’s a challenge in her voice. Bucky wants to respond to it, but it’s a moment before he can find the words. He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t wondered the same things—if he hadn’t had doubts, in the dark hours of the past weeks and months, of just what Steve’s motive was for saving him at all. He certainly hadn’t been gentle about it, leaving behind cracked ribs and a bruise across Bucky’s torso where he’d hooked the metal arm around him. But Bucky forces the memory away; it won’t help him now. “You said it yourself,” he tells her, “it would take a while to break HYDRA conditioning. We should probably be impressed that it only took him a couple months.”

She makes a frustrated noise. “So that’s your argument? Because he’s a loose cannon who just broke free of seventy years of brainwashed murder and took out an entire cell singlehandedly, that makes him totally safe since he’s not actively—”

 _“No,”_ Bucky insists, gritting his teeth as they jolt over the cracked asphalt. “I didn’t say he was safe.”

“Yeah, and that’s the p—”

“But just because he’s not safe doesn’t mean he’s necessarily going to kill us in our sleep,” he goes on, holding up a hand to stop her as she takes another breath. “Look, I—I know he’s dangerous, I know he’s not back to himself—you heard him, he thinks I’m his fucking _handler.”_ She closes her mouth and Bucky takes a steadying breath of his own. “He’s not himself. But I can’t just give up on him. I won’t do it.”

Natasha blinks at him, considering. “You might not have a choice.”

“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,” he says, and he can see the disbelief in her eyes, but he ignores it. “One thing, though, Romanoff, you can count on—if you want to _put him down,_ then you’re gonna have to do me first.”

She just looks at him, a strange, intense focus in her eyes, and then shakes her head. Ahead of them, the abandoned complex is a dark shape against the slowly-lightening sky, the chain-link gate sagging half-open. Natasha gets out and drags it to one side, and when she gets back behind the wheel she turns the same look on him again: he thinks she might be sizing him up. “How do you want to do this, then?” she asks. “If we’re not killing him yet. How are you going to keep him from killing us?”

Bucky bites his lip. He sees, with a bitter satisfaction under his tongue, two figures picking their way around the side of the closest building. “You know that saying about keeping your friends close?”

———

The sun comes up slowly as they drive, turning the sky to a deep indigo, then threading it with gold, then painting the scudding clouds pink above the farmland. Finally the clear day arrives, and Bucky almost wishes it hadn’t. He can see the grayish cast of Steve’s skin, which he had thought was the fluorescent light in the base but looks more like something that’s just been inside for too long. He can see the dirt crusted under his nails and the lank tangle of his hair.

It’s about seven o’clock when they turn off the interstate, not quite at the Tennessee border. As Sam steers them toward the first fast food place they pass, Natasha stows her pistol under her seat. They park at the back of the lot, and she heads toward the restaurant without speaking.

They’re leaning on the hood of the car, the metal warm and dusty, when Sam speaks. “So,” he says, “I don’t know if you remember, but I was there in D.C.”

His tone is so conversational, it makes Bucky look around in frank bewilderment—and he finds Sam gazing calmly at Steve, and Steve looking back with a baffled expression that Bucky’s sure must match his own.

“I don’t know if you remember,” Sam repeats when Steve says nothing. “You ripped one of my wings off.”

Steve glances to Bucky as if asking a question, then looks quickly back to Sam. “I remember,” he says, strangely toneless. “I’m sorry.”

Sam raises one eyebrow, apparently surprised. “All’s fair in brainwashing and war.”

“You,” Steve starts, and glances at Bucky again. “You don’t act like a soldier,” he says tentatively. He sounds nearly afraid, just like in the base—though there’s nothing around them but parked cars and weeds.

“I can be a soldier when I have to,” Sam replies. If he notices the fear, he doesn’t show it, just rolls his shoulders and squints into the sun in the direction of the restaurant. “But, you know, that can’t be all the time. I gotta do other stuff, too.”

Bucky scoffs without meaning to. He can’t help it. He recognizes this talk, because he’s heard Sam give it before: to vets at meetings Bucky sat in on back in D.C., to Bucky himself a couple times on the road before Bucky told him to can it. Sam’s mouth quirks in a wry smile that Bucky knows is meant for him, but he doesn’t look over. Instead, he’s still watching Steve, who asks— “Like what?”

“Oh,” Sam says, and shrugs, his gaze cutting briefly to Bucky with an expression that could almost be smug, if Sam weren’t too righteous for that. “Uh, you know—cat videos, sci-fi movies. Photography. What about you,” he adds, “you got any hobbies?”

Bucky grits his teeth to keep from speaking—it seems cruel, asking this of Steve when he’s done nothing but fight other people’s battles for the last seventy years—but he senses that it might not be helpful to point it out in front of Steve himself. In any case, Steve is just giving Sam a blank look, enough of an answer in itself. As much as it breaks Bucky’s heart, he’s relieved. Maybe they can forget this now, spare all of them the pain—

“What makes you happy?” Sam asks, leaning forward.

For the third time, Steve glances to Bucky. And Bucky finds himself unprepared—he shrugs, wanting Steve to look away, a weight in his stomach when he does. The truth is that he knew the answer once—he studied how to make Steve happy like it was a religion, back when it could be as simple as a new pencil or the chance to pull their mattress out onto the fire escape in the summer heat. He saved up each memory of Steve’s smile against the bad days. But—somewhere in all the years since, he forgot. And he doesn’t know the first thing about how to make the person in front of him happy.

“I don’t remember,” Steve answers. Again, that edge of doubt, approaching fear, as if he can’t bear to not give an answer.

“Well,” Sam says, drawing the word out into a sigh, “too bad I can’t help much there. Those history books just say you and Barnes were always together”—a nod toward Bucky, another half-smile—“they don’t say what you all got up to.”

Bucky freezes with Steve’s eyes on him again, that questioning look: what is he supposed to say? If Steve doesn’t know, if he doesn’t remember any of it—what good can Bucky do after all this time? Even the thought of trying makes him feel battered and old. “We did plenty of stuff,” he says, because Steve won’t look away and he has to answer: the words pulled out of him. “But it was just—we were just living.” He shrugs. He isn’t sure he wants to give Steve what he’s searching for, whatever it is—doesn’t want to look too close. “We were just trying to get by.”

———

**APPROX. LOCATION: THAYER, MISSOURI**

Bucky takes the middle watch. Normally, sleeping somewhere with a lock on the door, they’d risk going a night without it—but Bucky doesn’t need Natasha to convince him that Steve still poses a certain threat to them. No matter that he’s apparently dead to the world when Bucky takes up the seat by the door, Natasha slipping silently into the bed opposite Sam, who doesn’t move.

It’s hard to know what to think, looking at Steve in this deep sleep. Until now it’s been strictly survival—in the base, with so much still unknown, and then the long hours in the car, silence thicker than concrete. Now, Steve lies still and unarmed, and Bucky thinks unwillingly of long nights in Europe, sharing a foxhole, watching him doze through gunfire just far enough away to feel separate. It wasn’t so much that he could sleep through anything—more that they all grabbed at rest when there was the chance. Even tonight, Steve seemed to be asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. Old habit from the war, Bucky wonders, or HYDRA? Is there any difference, to Steve?

And that’s the problem: that Bucky doesn’t know what he’s looking at, how to feel about it. And he can’t keep the two straight if he lets himself wonder. He bites down on his tongue, looking away from Steve, out of the crack in the curtains at the neon-lit parking lot. The resentment bubbles up again, but it’s overshadowed by—exhaustion, he thinks, though it’s hard to tell at this point. And not just from the late hour.

He looks back at the room and starts, barely stopping himself from reaching for his gun. Steve is sitting up in bed, his outlines fuzzy in the darkness. He doesn’t move for a minute, apparently looking down at his lap, like he’s waiting. Then he turns his head toward Bucky, who beckons with a jerk of his head. No point in ignoring each other, he thinks heavily. He watches as Steve gets up—no sound of the bedsprings, he must know the same trick as Natasha—and pads over to stand in front of him. Bucky pulls the other chair out from the little table and scoots it toward Steve with his foot. Steve sits.

“What woke you up?” Bucky asks. He knows Natasha and Sam are both asleep, but even so, he pitches his voice so low it’s almost soundless.

Steve shifts in his chair, sitting up straighter. There’s not much space between the bed and the door, so they’re squeezed together, knees almost touching. “I wasn’t asleep,” he says, matching Bucky’s volume. “I—couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too loud.” Bucky scoffs, incredulous: they’re in the middle of nowhere, no noise of traffic, no sounds from the rooms on either side of them. “The breathing,” Steve explains. “I’ve never slept near anyone.”

Now that he’s pointed it out, Bucky can hear it, Sam and Natasha’s soft breath in the darkness. He supposes it is loud, from a certain perspective, but— “You shared a room with me for five years,” he says, unable to help it. He sees that Steve is listening to him, the flicker as he blinks, but it’s the same as when he tried to convince Steve he wasn’t his handler. Some kind of wall between the words and any comprehension. “You can—” Bucky falters, not sure if he’s misreading. “It’s okay,” he says, “if you remember things.”

Steve doesn’t react, stays perfectly still, but it’s a stillness of a different sort. Wary, almost fearful.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” Bucky asks, not wanting to be right. Steve doesn’t tell him yes or no, but he doesn’t have to. “I won’t hurt you. If you remember things, I won’t—punish you, or anything. It’s okay.”

Steve lifts his gaze to meet Bucky’s. “You say that a lot,” he says. “That you aren’t going to hurt me.”

“I mean it,” Bucky says at once. He wants to tell Steve just how much he means it, but he doesn’t think he can stomach the denial again.

“I know,” Steve replies, and drops his eyes at once, only to glance back up a moment later. It would be coy if his expression weren’t so brittle.

Bucky wants to grab the hand that’s resting lightly on Steve’s knee, wants to take him by the shoulders. But he settles for asking, “How do you know that?”

“I don’t know,” Steve says. “You’re my handler.”

“You’ve had handlers who hurt you,” Bucky presses, disappointment flaring hot in his chest, glancing toward the far bed to check that the others are still sleeping. Back to Steve, who’s not looking away. “How do you know I’m any different?”

“I don’t—know,” Steve says, like he’s fighting to get the words out. “You were the first.”

There’s something helpless in his voice. It hurts to hear, and Bucky wants—to just reach out, to be closer, to have Steve look at him and _know_ him. “It’s okay,” he says. “Never mind. It’s fine.”

Steve nods. The battered mini-fridge against the wall re-starts its cycle with a loud, whining hum. “Pierce,” Steve says, “didn’t want me to remember.” Even the new noise can’t cover the tremor in Steve’s voice when he says the name.

“He’s gone,” Bucky says. “He doesn’t matter now.” He winces at the look Steve turns on him, blank but with an undercurrent of shock and disbelief—a careless thing to say, of course Pierce still matters, hanging over their shoulders like a ghost that won’t move on—but hesitates. He doesn’t think he can say he’s sorry again and have it still hold any meaning. “It’ll be different,” Bucky says, “with us. We won’t— _I_ won’t—I want you to remember,” he fumbles. “I want you to—”

“But I don’t,” Steve interrupts, so raw and choked that Bucky thinks for one horrible heart-stopping second that there’s nothing else, that he simply doesn’t remember, and then Steve takes a grating breath and continues, “I don’t understand. The things I know, I don’t—I don’t know _how,_ I don’t know what they mean. I just—” He looks up at Bucky, keeping his frantic voice to a whisper with a visible effort. “I just want a mission,” he says.

Bucky sits back in his chair, scrubs a hand over his face so he won’t have to look at Steve and see the expression he’s wearing. He looks, Bucky thinks with his eyes shut tight, just as lost as he did on the bridge. On the helicarrier, maddened and in pain. So he wants a mission: maybe that will help, focus him, give him some semblance of control. Maybe everything will get easier after that. “What kind of mission?” he asks, letting his hand drop.

Steve looks at him without comprehension. “Whatever you need me to do.”

So there’s no way out. Bucky forces his expression into something close to neutral, but he’s seized by the awful desire to laugh, because it’s funny, isn’t it? That he’s been fine all these years, decades inching by so torturously slow and alone and he’s been _fine,_ really, went from black ops to dingy apartments and back again, and now here Steve is in front of him and—

And no matter what he thought he wanted, before, the truth is so much uglier. The truth: that he has to give Steve what he’s asking for, because otherwise Bucky will lose him to the things HYDRA put in his head; that it’s a relief, in some sick way, to fall into the role Steve expects, to have a direction in which to point himself. “Okay,” he says, and he doesn’t feel like laughing anymore. He feels tired, down to his bones. Too tired to do anything but surrender. “Okay, I—I want you to—help us. I want you to fight HYDRA.” Does it make it less terrible, he wonders, if it’s something Steve would’ve done anyway?

Steve nods, and maybe it’s just Bucky’s imagination, but he thinks the set of his shoulders changes, straightens as if he’s standing at attention, like he’s ready to go out and fight this very minute. And he probably is.

But there’s still that doubt, lingering on his face when he looks at Bucky, so slight Steve probably doesn’t even realize it shows. Bucky feels a painful twinge, recognizing it through the darkness. “Will you tell me?” he asks, soft as he can, softer even than secrecy warrants. “What you’re thinking?”

He half-expects Steve to refuse, or to say he isn’t thinking anything, whatever answer Pierce and the other handlers would’ve wanted him to give. Instead, Steve lets out a slow breath and says, “I don’t know how.”

“You can just say it,” Bucky tells him. “Whatever it is.”

Steve hesitates another moment and Bucky can almost see the fight that’s going on, the clear uncertainty warring with—the command, Bucky supposes, though he hadn’t meant it as one. “I thought I remembered,” he says, “a place—a room. With you.”

An electric charge in Bucky’s skin, racing along every nerve. “What kind of room?”

“It was small,” Steve says. “There were cracks on the ceiling.” He tilts his head. “You were smoking.”

It could be anywhere, Bucky knows, from any one of the holes they wound up in during the war. But he thinks first of their apartment, the tiny bedroom with the bed shoved to one side to make it fit, the water stains and the creaking floor. The window to the fire escape where Bucky would have his cigarettes to keep Steve from coughing. “What else?” he asks, trying to bite down on his burgeoning hope.

“I don’t—” Steve breathes in and shoots another glance at Bucky, wordlessly asking some question Bucky can’t decipher. “I think it was winter. There was frost on the window.”

The half-asleep tone of his voice, the patchwork details—it’s not worse than if Steve remembered nothing at all, but damn if it doesn’t hurt. The hope vanishes as quickly as it came. “Might’ve been before the war,” Bucky offers. “Hard to know without anything else to go on.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says with the barest breath of sound, his voice breaking on the word.

“It’s okay,” Bucky says, “you don’t have to—if you don’t remember—”

“I do,” Steve says, “but it’s—I told you, it doesn’t make sense, and I can’t—I don’t know when, or where.” He shakes his head.

“All right,” Bucky says, and he can’t stop himself from reaching out, stopping just short of touching. “Maybe more will come back,” he suggests, not wanting to let himself believe it. “With time.”

“Maybe,” Steve echoes, clearly doubtful. He looks down at Bucky’s hand as if it’s a foreign thing, the function of which he doesn’t quite understand.

Disappointment sits like a rock in Bucky’s chest, pressing in on his lungs. “You should get some sleep,” he says, turning back to the window, the cracked asphalt lot, hearing the edge of frustration creep into his voice and lacking the energy to smooth it away. “It’ll be a long drive tomorrow.”

———

**APPROX. LOCATION: LOVELAND, COLORADO**

“The base is here,” Sam says, tapping the spot on the map. “In a valley. Pretty low visibility, it’s all pine forest.”

Natasha leans over the table, tucking her hair behind one ear. “There’s a trailhead there,” she says, pointing. “We can drive into the hills, take the trail up to here, then cut across, head down into the valley from the east.” She traces the line with her finger.

“They might not expect it,” Bucky reasons, “with the rough terrain.” He glances at Sam, who’s massaging the base of his neck where the wing straps always dig in. “Did you get a look at what sort of defenses they have?”

Sam makes a face. “I couldn’t get too low with the moon out. But the base was probably—three-fourths of the way across the valley. It looked like it was built into the slope on the other side,” he adds. “Covered in moss, some kind of ivy—”

“Hey,” Natasha interrupts. They both look up at her and she nods at something over Bucky’s shoulder.

He turns to see Steve, who had been sitting quietly on the bed—to all appearances, only half-listening—now on his feet, staring at them, a rigid expression on his face. Every line of his body is tensed, his hands strangely restless at his sides, the plates shifting in his metal arm. His gaze jumps—from Bucky, to the map, to the door—

“Steve,” Bucky says, and Steve looks back to him. “What’s up?”

Steve takes a halting step forward into the light of the buzzing lamp. “The base,” Steve says, his voice thin. “I know it.”

“When were you going to share?” Natasha demands.

Quickly, Steve shakes his head. “I didn’t know it was in Colorado,” he says, his head half-lowered in her direction. “I didn’t—know where it was. But I know the place. The valley. It’s a bunker—mostly underground.”

Natasha shoots a disbelieving glance toward Sam, who nods. “That’s what it looked like from the air,” he says. “It checks out.”

Far from looking relieved, Steve’s gaze grows more intense, his eyes fixed on the map as he approaches the table. Up close, Bucky can see how tightly his jaw is clenched, how his pupils are blown wide. He’s afraid, Bucky realizes; he’s terrified. “Steve?” Bucky asks, quiet, thrown by Steve’s distress as if it were his own.

Steve flinches from him, almost instinctively, and glances toward Natasha. “I didn’t know,” he repeats. “I’m sorry.”

He’s trembling. Bucky can see it in his fingers even if he can’t hear it in his voice. Across the table, Natasha starts to hiss something and Sam cuts across her in a low tone. Bucky’s only partially listening: he keeps his attention on Steve. “You don’t need to apologize,” he says. “It’s okay, remember? No one’s gonna punish you.”

It’s to him that Steve directs his next frightened glance, but there’s a flicker of relief on his face at last. An infinitesimal loosening of his shoulders. “It’s—part of the mission?” he asks. “You’re trying to take the base, kill the agents. Right?”

“That’s about the size of it,” Bucky agrees. He hears a modicum of calm in Steve’s voice now—or, if not calm, then at least focus, a sharp control. As much as it comforts him, he doesn’t miss the way Natasha shifts her weight, the anxious twist of her mouth. He remembers the way she’d looked at him— _what do you mean, you told him where we’re going_ —and though she’d ultimately agreed that it would be too hard to keep Steve in the dark, he knows she’s still not happy about it.

“You can’t,” Steve says, apparently no longer paying much mind to Natasha’s unease, meeting Bucky’s eyes with a look of confidence that’s almost familiar—smoky command tents, mountains in the snow. “Not like that. Not from the valley. They’ll have mines buried in that direction, to flush out anyone getting close.”

He lowers his eyes to the map again, his brow furrowed, and yet—his hand grips the edge of the table, hard. “How do you know about the base?” Bucky asks, watching Steve’s knuckles go white. “What does it have to do with you?”

Again, Steve shakes his head, the movement jerky. “You have to go around,” he says. “From the west.”

His voice is clipped, but Bucky thinks he hears a tremor in it. “You don’t have to say anything about it, if you don’t want to.”

“I do want to,” Steve says at once. “I want to help.” He looks away from Bucky, quickly, and yet Bucky senses the same desperation as in Missouri: _I just want a mission._ “That base,” he says, tapping the map with a steady metal hand, “it should be—” He clears his throat. “Why that one?”

“You’re right.” It’s Natasha who speaks, and Bucky looks around in surprise: her expression is grim, and she’s standing as if she’s ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice, but the outright hostility is gone from her gaze. “It should be empty. All the records we’ve found show that cell as inactive for the last three decades.”

“So why are we here?” Steve asks.

Natasha hesitates a moment. “When you—in Mississippi, in the base there, we had a tip that HYDRA was making plans again. Working on something big. The intel we got in that base confirmed it, and it pointed us here.”

Steve frowns at her. “What are they doing?”

There’s silence, then, and in the quiet, Bucky wonders if he’s imagining the rigid strain along Steve’s back, as if his spine were tethered to a steel rod. He doesn’t think so: for all that Steve seems to have overcome his panic, Bucky knows what it looks like when he’s forcing a show of composure. It makes him think of back alleys, Steve spitting blood, one eye swelling shut, insisting on throwing the last punch; that endless stubbornness.

Sam sighs, and says at last, “We don’t know. There’s a trail to follow, but not much of one.” He shakes his head. “They should be gone, but—that’s HYDRA. Cut off one head, you know.” He smiles crookedly.

“Another takes its place,” Steve says softly, apparently without thinking—and then he looks up. “I can get you in,” he says, “if we come from the west. There’s an entry point there.”

It makes Bucky feel faintly sick, watching him muscle through the fear: he doesn’t think either Sam or Natasha notices, but he can’t ignore it. Like walking with a bullet in his own leg. Then again, if he were to protest, what would change? Steve thinks Bucky is his handler, so he’s going along with the mission Bucky gave him—and, terribly, they need the help.

But he wonders if there’s something more to it. If this really is the same obstinacy he remembers from the way Steve used to be, or if it’s something else—if HYDRA cut off Steve’s head and another took its place, turned him into the fighting machine he always wanted to be and left the rest of him for dead.

———

They aren’t that far underground, but Bucky feels the earth over them pressing down: their footsteps echo down the tunnel no matter how lightly they step. Bucky knows they’re not alone, they can’t be; they’ll come across more agents sooner or later, but Steve is in front and taking the turns with such surety he seems almost to be sleepwalking. There’s no way to know what’s coming up until they’re on top of it.

Which is why it’s only a partial surprise when they turn a corner and find several people staring back at them, shocked and silent, someone still turning around to face them in a swivel chair. Steve reacts before Bucky does, his pistol out and firing once, twice, and one of the agents goes down—

Bucky stops noticing and just fights. It’s like falling asleep, giving himself over to the years of training, to the countless operations in places just like this, every one of them the same dance. Sight, shoot, new target. Bucky takes one out at the knees and leaves him for Sam, behind him, to take care of; the one in the swivel chair stands up and Bucky shoots him and he falls back, limp, and the woman behind him takes aim and Bucky raises his arm another five degrees and she’s gone—

Someone brushes past him: Steve, barreling toward the door at the other end of the room, behind which they can hear the sound of boots and shouting. Steve ducks as he goes, bending down toward one of the fallen agents, barely breaking his stride. Bucky steps forward—Steve only has one gun, and by the sound of it there are at least a dozen people behind that door—but Steve opens the door, tosses something through it, and shuts it again. He immediately turns and starts walking with long strides back toward the middle of the room. As he comes, he locks eyes with Bucky and raises his pistol.

Bucky flinches—Steve fires—behind the door, something explodes—and from behind Bucky comes the unmistakable sound of a body hitting the floor. Bucky whips around to see an agent on the ground with a hole in his head. Four feet away, Natasha brings her own gun up and points it at Steve, and Sam forces her arm down. “Don’t,” he says, “it’s all good.”

Bucky doesn’t wait to see her reaction; he turns back to Steve, staring, straining to hear more threats coming down the hall and unable to really concentrate on anything beyond the instant replay of the last five seconds. Steve stooping, opening the door, turning back to Bucky, the hard look in his eyes, the barrel of his gun. It was a grenade, Bucky realizes faintly, a grenade that Steve took from the agent’s belt and tossed through the door. He’s still blinking at Steve, slow with shock, and Steve’s looking back, lowering his gun.

———

“It’s empty,” Bucky says, his voice ringing off the featureless walls: there’s no door out of this room except the one they came through. A table knocked on its side, a mess of papers scattered on the floor—and in the middle, a hulking chair of dark metal, a structure of rods rising out of the back to form an open circle. Steve stops so suddenly that Bucky nearly stumbles into him. “Come on,” he says, jerking his head back toward the door. “We should go, they’ll have cleared that wing by now—” But he falters at the look on Steve’s face. “We gotta go,” he says again. “Maybe we missed someplace, if they find us here we’re trapped—”

“There’s no one else,” Steve says. He’s standing to the side, looking away and to the ground, his head turned toward nothing. The gun is loose in his hand; as Bucky watches, he holsters it, a sharp, purposeful movement. But then he just stands there. “This cell was barely operational. I don’t think they’ve used it since—” and he jerks his head toward the chair without looking at it.

Bucky takes a step toward him, then another when Steve doesn’t flinch. Somehow, the frozen absence of a response is almost worse. Closer, Bucky can see the way Steve’s standing, the tremor in his fingers, the way his breath shakes as he exhales. “Stevie?” Bucky asks, tentatively, adrenaline making the word harsher than he means it to be. “What’s up?”

In degrees, Steve turns his head toward him, looks up through his lashes and the hair that’s fallen in his eyes. Bucky has a memory to go with this look, the bottomed-out fear, worse than Azzano and every battle after it—the train, he thinks, not wanting to; the last time he saw Steve like this, Steve was clinging to a thin strip of metal and Bucky was reaching out—

He swallows, an audible click in the quiet room. Holds Steve’s gaze. “Did you stay here?” he asks. “Did they—keep you here?”

Steve opens his mouth but nothing comes out, the silence an undeniable answer. Bucky looks back toward the chair, taking it in with new eyes: the straps along the arms, the dull gleam of the metal under the dust. “That’s where they—?” His voice fails.

“It was—later,” Steve says, the words grating like rocks. “After your time.”

“No,” Bucky says, automatic, everything in him rebelling at the thought that Steve could associate him with this, even in the negative—it hurts like a punch to the gut. But he swallows down his protestations, watching Steve drop his gaze back to the ground, to the blood on his boots. The same dusty boots he wore when they found him in Mississippi, maybe the same ones he wore in D.C. “It’s over,” Bucky tells him. “You said it—they’re gone.” The words don’t seem to have any effect. He inches closer.

At the movement, Steve lifts his head again, and that same strange expression is still on his face: bare and broken and somehow blistering, frightening in its rawness.

“What is it?” Bucky asks.

“I—” Like a caged animal, the way he’s looking at Bucky. “I just—”

He turns away, launches himself toward the chair with a speed that leaves Bucky lurching forward, off-balance. He’s unarmed, his gun still holstered, but he rips at the wrist straps and the harnesses and then at the metal until it bends aside, groaning, under his hands. An animal noise is audible over the wrenching metal, one that Bucky doesn’t think Steve is even aware of making—but he doesn’t stop, he pulls bits of the chair loose from their bolts, breaks the arms over his knees and sets to work prying aside the rods that arc over the seat.

Bucky’s first instinct is to go after Steve, to haul him out of this fight as he has so many others—but he stops, uncertain whether Steve would recognize him in this frantic state. He worries that Steve will hurt himself—he already has, his right hand bleeding at the knuckles and from scrapes on his palm. There are red smears on the warped pieces that now lie discarded on the floor.

But there’s something in Steve’s desperate assault that feels familiar: the abandon of it, the painful relief. He winces at the scream of metal as Steve rips the seat up, the crash as it collides with the wall. There’s no stopping this, not until Steve’s finished.

He watches sparks fly from whatever machinery was under the seat, catches sight of Steve’s face, the twisted expression, the sweat and the blood. He appreciates, distantly, how pleased Zola must have been that it was Steve who fell into his clutches. Not Bucky, with only HYDRA’s own second-rate drug, an imitation at best, but Steve: running on Erskine’s serum, the real deal. It’s evident in the relentlessness of his attack, the speed and the raw power—Bucky can come close, but he can’t match this. The years and HYDRA’s machinations haven’t taken it away. The next thought makes his stomach lurch, the idle wondering: if Bucky had had Erskine’s drug, would he have been able to save Steve? And would Steve have caught him if it had been Bucky hanging from the train?

There’s not much left of the chair now, the wreckage strewn about like an impact crater. Steve is hurling himself against the chair, struggling to do something—Bucky’s not sure what—and then he notices the bolts that secure the chair to the floor, sees them straining and hears the painful screeching of the metal against itself. Steve braces his body against the chair, the jagged, twisted edges digging into his shirt, into his hand where he clutches at it. The chair tips slowly to the side, crumpling almost—the bolts warping under the pressure—and then it lodges, blocked from listing further by some factor that Bucky can’t see. Steve shoves at the chair for a few moments more, but there’s no more movement. Unsteadily, he steps back.

The room is still except for Steve’s breathing, rough and edged with a wheeze that reminds Bucky of the long-gone asthma but is probably closer to panic. He feels some of it himself, looking at Steve’s strangely small silhouette as he stands alone there, a fear that stems from uncertainty—but then the pain wins out and Bucky has to step forward. Steve lets him approach, blinks and glances toward him without lifting his head. When Bucky reaches out and puts a hand on Steve’s arm, Steve doesn’t shy away.

“I’m here,” Bucky tells him; he doesn’t know what else to say.

Steve’s mouth twitches. “Till the end of the line, huh?” His voice is ragged, the words almost slurred.

“As long as you want,” Bucky says, helpless. He steps closer and closes more of the distance between them. “Let me see your hand.”

“It’ll be fully functional by noon tomorrow,” Steve says, but he offers his hand to Bucky anyway, the fingers curled gingerly inward. He’s shaking still, not just in his hand but his whole body.

Bucky hesitates, his own hands hovering inches from Steve’s. He wants—there’s something in him that wants to bandage Steve’s hand the way he always used to, when he split his knuckles in back alleys. But the Steve of those long minutes in their tiny bathroom would always glare at him, defiant, daring him to say, as he always did, _are we really doin’ this again—_ while the Steve before him now can barely meet his eyes and is only holding out his hand because Bucky told him to. Despair rises up and chokes him and he has to blink his vision clear. “You destroyed that thing,” he says, not looking at the chair but tilting his head toward it, knowing Steve understands. “You—you took it down, okay? It’s gone.”

“Buck,” Steve gasps like a drowning man, and he grabs at Bucky’s hands though it’s got to hurt, clutches at him like there’s nothing else holding him up. “It wasn’t in the—the mission parameters, I shouldn’t have, I’m sorry—”

“God,” Bucky says, and catches Steve when he comes apart. The warm, solid weight of him is a shock to Bucky’s system but his mouth keeps going even as his mind stutters and scratches like a broken record. “No, Stevie, it’s—you did good, you got us through. You hear me? You saved my life back there, it’s okay—it’s okay,” he repeats, Steve shuddering against him, his head pressing down on Bucky’s shoulder as if he could curl up against him and be small again. “It’s gone, they’re all gone. You’re done, okay?” The noise Steve makes is muffled by Bucky’s shoulder, but Bucky thinks it might be _yeah._ He shifts to hold Steve better, his own eyes burning and every part of him aching just to give whatever comfort he can. “You made it.”

He doesn’t know what to do with the way Steve’s clinging to him, the brokenness of his voice and his body and the wrongness of it all—he knows this is what he was made for, once, in that other life he used to have, but it’s been too long and whatever instinct he used to rely on has long since been bled out of him. Like muscle memory, the way he holds Steve, pulling him close and talking to him slow and soft—but the muscle itself has atrophied, not much good for anything now. It frightens him.

As if he can sense Bucky’s doubt, Steve pulls back, wipes his face with his sleeve. That blank, cold mask is gone, it’s been gone since he caught sight of the chair, but what’s in its place is—an unexpected confusion, a furrow in his brow. “We need,” he says, and takes a steadying breath, “we need to search the base. It doesn’t—”

“Hold on,” Bucky says, some kind of black panic slamming into him at Steve’s tone, the hint of clipped distance coming back into his voice and face. He tightens his grip on Steve’s shoulder until he meets Bucky’s eyes again. “Wilson and Romanoff have got the searching covered. They’ll come get us if there’s anything for us to do. You just—it’s okay, all right? If you take a breather for a second.”

Steve gives him a baffled look. “What, you want me to sit it out?”

He sounds so indignant that Bucky has the hysterical urge to laugh, to clap him on the back and tell him to get the fuck over himself like he used to. “Yeah,” Bucky says instead, “I want you to take some time until you’re ready to keep going.”

“I am ready,” Steve insists.

Bucky blinks at him, then glances pointedly to the chair over his shoulder. “You sure about that?”

“Buck,” Steve says, and instead of the anger Bucky expects—the wounded, prideful vitriol Steve once would’ve thrown at him without thinking—his voice goes quiet, almost pleading. “I gotta keep going. I gotta finish the mission.”

The fight goes out of Bucky; he can’t bear to hear Steve talk like this while looking like _that_ —like he’s come straight out of the goddamn war, exhaustion and pain written plain on his face and his eyes most of all. “Okay,” he says, hating himself, but—Jesus Christ, he thinks, if Steve wants to tear himself to ribbons taking down HYDRA, then it’s no different from what the rest of them are doing.

———

They creep back to the car in silence, the long walk made longer by the lingering feeling of being watched, heightened by the complete absence of any noises above the soft hum of insects and the occasional owl’s call. Bucky would chalk it up to his own paranoia if he couldn’t sense the others’ unease as well: constantly looking over their shoulders, picking out a path where the shadows are deepest.

They don’t waste time idling at the trailhead, and no one talks as they start the switchback down. The moon’s passed its zenith, Bucky sees, and the road before them is clear and bright. Natasha’s hands are steady on the wheel.

“Did you find anything?” Bucky asks eventually, scraping the words out because he has to: the post-mission routine, the debrief once the danger’s past. “Or anyone?”

“Just this,” Natasha says, and when he looks up to the driver’s seat, she’s pulling something out of her jacket pocket. “I went back and checked that room where those agents were,” she says. She hands the object to Sam, who twists around in his seat to show Bucky and Steve. It’s a USB drive, dark gray plastic spattered with blood, sitting like a murder clue in the palm of Sam’s open hand.

“What,” Bucky says, “was it just sitting on the table?”

“In the light fixture,” Steve says suddenly. Bucky and Sam both turn to him, staring, but he’s looking at Natasha in the mirror. “Wasn’t it?”

She nods, glancing back at them, startled. “They taught you that one too, huh?”

“For mission security,” Steve says.

Bucky suppresses a shudder at the words, instead eyeing the USB drive. Another part of the trap, he wonders, or something HYDRA really didn’t want them to find? “You’ll be able to decrypt it?”

“Hopefully,” she says, and tucks the drive back into her pocket when Sam hands it to her.

“Hopefully,” Bucky repeats, unable to keep the doubt out of his voice. “There really wasn’t anything else? No—hidden rooms, nothing? We’ve run into that before.”

“Usually right before the place blows up,” Natasha says. Her eyes meet his in the rearview mirror. “But—really, Barnes, no. Not just a skeleton crew, no weapons to speak of—it didn’t even look like there’d _been_ anything there in years. All the other rooms were empty, too.”

Bucky bites the inside of his mouth, a keen disappointment lancing through him, and below that, something darker simmering away. “It’s just,” he says, staring out the window at the swooping curves of the power lines. “It’s just, why was there anyone here at all if they weren’t hiding anything valuable? I mean, burying mines—?”

“There’s nothing valuable here,” Steve says, “without the Asset.”

The silence thickens, and Bucky thinks of the wreckage of the chair, bites his cheek again to drive away the horror that keeps returning like a tide each time he thinks he’s done with it. “But you weren’t there,” he says, and from the way Steve glances at him, he knows they’re both finishing the sentence: _anymore._

“Like I said,” Steve replies, his voice even. “This cell wasn’t anywhere near full capacity. Even if they’d been expecting an attack, they couldn’t have put up much of a defense.”

“So—” Bucky chuckles, bleak. “So we went in there for nothing.” He can’t shake the feeling that the whole thing was a trap, despite the fact that they all made it out without much trouble. The details replay in his mind: the way Steve guided them to the west entrance, how quickly they dealt with the agents inside. The chair, looming in that darkened room, waiting for them. He’s sure there’s something he’s missed, something none of them are seeing.

No one contradicts him, and they lapse into silence, the moon edging downward as they drive out of the mountains and back into town with its handful of stoplights. Bucky keeps his eyes on the window, but he isn’t watching the shadowy trees or the darkened windows. He’s thinking: this is all they’ve got. Intelligence from Natasha’s contact led them to Mississippi, and now they’re here on what amounts to little more than a wish and a prayer—and wherever they go next depends on that stick of plastic and metal. He doesn’t want to imagine what they’ll find when they get there: another chair? Something worse?

He looks over when they’re stopped at a red light, the intersection deserted, the engine humming beneath them, and sees Steve looking down at his hands, the metal thumb of the left gingerly tracing the scrapes in the palm of the right. He looks up and meets Bucky’s gaze, then glances away, out his own window, the side of his face flickering in the passing lights.


	2. Chapter 2

It’s not yet eight o’clock in the morning by the time they check out of the motel room, leaving cash and their keys on the table. They head east on the highway in the wavering light that glares off of the windshield. By nine-fifteen, they’re three towns away, bunched behind Natasha in a community center populated with senior citizens, the fan whirring obnoxiously as she taps away on an old desktop computer. “So how are you going to do this?” Bucky asks.

“You wouldn’t understand it,” she says, keeping her eyes on the screen.

“I think it’s important that I know what’s going—”

“You learned to use computers in your seventies,” she snaps, “and unless I missed a chapter in the history textbooks, you haven’t hacked anything in the thirty years since then.” She glances at him and _tsks_ in exasperation. “If you want to help, take those two and get a coffee downstairs. Stop hovering.”

Bucky hesitates. “I don’t think we should split up.”

“The longer you talk to me,” she says, “the longer it’s going to take. HYDRA could be tracking this thing already.”

There’s no arguing with that, so they go downstairs. Bucky hands his own black coffee to Steve, too on edge to drink it. His eyes itch, the sleepless nights catching up to him once again, but it’s the sort of tiredness that leaves him jittery instead of lethargic. Sam seems to be of the same mind, sidling away from them to gaze out at the street, watching the ever-changing row of cars parked outside. High alert, just like the rest of them.

“I don’t think Romanoff trusts you,” Steve says.

“She does.” The observation unnerves him more than the argument, more even than the calm silence Steve’s kept up ever since the night before, though he tries not to examine why that is. “When it counts. She doesn’t have to like me.”

“That’s not how you felt before,” Steve says. “With Peggy.”

Bucky looks over quickly. Like a splash of cold water, always, no matter what memory it is, but this— “You remember Carter?” he asks.

Steve takes a sip of coffee. “Sort of.” He looks like he’s concentrating hard, squinting out toward the street without seeing it. “I remember—her voice. I think I remember her throwing a punch.” He chuckles once, but quickly grows serious again. “I remember the way she looked at me.”

He’d have to be dead, Bucky thinks, to have forgotten that. He knows what Steve’s remembering, what must be resurfacing, by the faint flush in his cheeks—stolen glances across briefing tables, Carter’s staccato laugh at the lewd jokes people tried not to tell around her, the smoky, brass-toned dream of the bars in England. That red dress, Bucky recalls, pulled to the front of his mind along with a residual bitterness not unlike the several glasses of whiskey he’d downed that night, and burning, too. He’d known then, looking at the way Steve spoke to her—and when her glance had passed over Bucky, she’d known him right back.

“Buck.” Steve’s voice draws him out of the memory and Bucky sees that he’s looking over now, distress etched into the lines of his face, put there by whatever expression Bucky’s wearing. “You said I should tell you if I remembered things—”

“I did,” Bucky says, and it’s remarkable how much effort it takes for his voice to come out evenly, doubly so that he actually manages it. “I’m not upset,” he says and wills it to be true. “I just—God,” he exhales, laughing weakly, “I didn’t expect to talk about her today.” He smiles at Steve and he seems to accept it. “What else?” he asks; in for a penny, in for a pound. “What else do you remember?”

Maybe Steve’s not so reassured after all; he looks at Bucky with some hesitation and takes another swallow of his coffee. “She was—she reminded me of you,” he says. “Still does. I think.”

“You—” Bucky pauses, the words knocked out of him. He almost can’t believe it’s the same Carter they’re talking about, thinking of her coolness toward him all through the war. But he knows he was as much at fault, that whatever hostility he felt from her was only a mirror of what she felt from him, and even there he thinks she probably tried just as hard as he did to ignore the cause of it. And—yes, he thinks, the memory clawing its way out of the spot he’d buried it inside himself—yes, after the train and the long trip back to London, she’d found him in the ruins of that bar and talked with him about sacrifice, but neither of them had believed it. Even though it would’ve been Steve to give his life for the cause if anyone would—she hadn’t looked sincere till she said _you won’t be alone,_ promising some inevitable future revenge, and Bucky had felt it was his own reflection looking back at him.

He keeps his face blank this time: a survival instinct, like staring down a captor. But it’s more than he can do to come up with a response, so he’s reduced to shaking his head and making a noise that Steve will hopefully interpret as a laugh. He sees Sam turn and steels himself for a discussion he neither wants nor feels prepared for—

“Jesus Christ,” Sam says, looking past both of them. “Are you two hearing any of this?”

Bucky looks behind him: Sam’s gazing at the TV hanging above a row of tables, the channel tuned to the news. There’s a picture on the screen of a young woman in her early twenties. The banner below the photograph reads: _Amanda Bailey missing for third week._

“Amanda Bailey?” Bucky asks, looking back to Sam. “Do you know her?”

“I know the name,” Sam says. “After Nat released those HYDRA files, there was a Senator Bailey heading the investigation into the three of us.” He frowns at Bucky. “You don’t remember?”

Bucky shrugs. “I haven’t talked to Congress since they tried to get me to back nuclear armament in the 60s.”

Sam snorts. “Well—she’s the reason we’re not being hunted by the FBI as well as HYDRA.”

“Same difference,” Bucky deadpans. He gazes up at the TV, which has switched from a picture of Amanda Bailey to a clip of her mother. The news anchor speaks over the footage: _Senator Bailey is taking a leave of absence from Congress..._

“Jesus,” Sam says again. “That’s fucked up.”

“What,” Bucky says, frowning, “you think it’s targeted?”

Sam blinks at him. “No, man, it’s just—messed up. You know how many girls go missing every year?”

“How many?” Steve asks quietly.

“Too many.” Sam crosses his arms. “And it’s fucked up even when their mothers _haven’t_ personally saved your ass from a life sentence.”

Bucky bristles at the look Sam’s giving him, glancing back up at the TV: the mother and daughter, he thinks, really do look uncannily alike. “What do you want me to do,” he says, “hightail it back to D.C. to start looking for the kid? Aren’t kidnappings what Spider-Man’s for?” With relief, he spots Natasha coming down the stairs. She makes eye contact with them but keeps moving toward the door, jerking her head for them to follow. They do so, Bucky falling into step between the other two. “Don’t you think we’ve got enough on our plates without worrying about her, too?” he murmurs to Sam as they head out. Sam doesn’t look at him, but his jaw is set. “You’re right,” Bucky allows, squinting in the morning sun when they step outside. “It’s messed up. But what the hell isn’t these days?”

———

They pull out onto the road and away from the community center, and Bucky leans forward from the back seat. “How’d it go?” he asks, ignoring Steve’s eyes on him.

She gives a short, irritated sigh. “I want to know who HYDRA hired to encrypt all their files,” she says. “I couldn’t decrypt it entirely—but it’s like Lehigh. I could at least figure out where the thing was encoded.” She holds up a slip of paper between two fingers.

Bucky looks closer and sees that she’s written coordinates on it. “Where’s that?”

“Nebraska.” She twists around to look at Steve. “Ever been to Nebraska?”

Steve shakes his head. “Not that I know of.”

She smiles without much amusement. “Well, speak up if you see anything familiar, I guess.”

Sam adjusts the mirror and turns them onto the highway. “Where in Nebraska?”

“Closest town is Brewster,” Natasha says, turning back around and settling into her seat. “It’s about five hours from here—we can get there by tonight, no problem.”

They travel steadily toward the northeastern corner of the state, the sun growing warmer through the windows as the morning lengthens. The farther they get from the mountains, the more monotonous the view beside the highway becomes. Bucky hasn’t been to Nebraska either, but he guesses it won’t be much to look at, since even rural Colorado feels a lot like Kansas; there’s corn here, too, stretching on for miles.

“What are you looking at?” Natasha says, sharply enough that Bucky jerks to attention though there’s no one else on the road. She’s looking over at Sam, who’s fiddling with the mirror again.

“Nothing,” Sam replies shortly, and immediately adds, “There’s a car following us.”

Bucky swivels in his seat to look out the back window even as Natasha and Steve do the same, but the road behind them is straight, flat, and totally empty. “Are you sure?” he asks. Even as the words leave his mouth the horizon shimmers in the heat and a blur appears at the very limit of his sight—it could be nothing, just the shadow of a cloud on the sun-baked asphalt, but heavy dread drops into his stomach all the same.

“I see it,” Steve says, dispelling all doubt.

“Maybe—” Bucky squints; his eyes aren’t as sharp as Steve’s, but it’s definitely a car. “Maybe it’s a coincidence?”

“Pretty big coincidence,” Sam says. He flexes his fingers on the wheel. “They’ve been following us since Kersey. They pulled up to the community center while we were inside.” He checks the mirror again. “I thought it was nothing, but—”

“Slow down,” Natasha suggests. “See if they pass you.”

Silently, Sam does so. His eyes flick to the mirror again and again, and Bucky turns around in his seat every thirty seconds. Gradually, the car behind them comes fully into view as a black van riding high above the road and dwarfing their own sedan. All four of them watch it inch closer, the silence growing strained with every mile. Bucky registers a sense of disbelief: they were in Kersey for less than half an hour; how could anyone have tracked them there?

The van approaches until it’s only a couple car-lengths behind them, and though Sam’s driving almost ten miles under the limit, it makes no sign of passing. Instead it matches their speed and creeps farther forward, closing the distance between them. Bucky stares, but he can’t make out anything through the flash on the windshield: tinted, or just the glare of the sun?

“Shit,” Sam says, and steps on the gas.

The van accelerates with them. “We need to shake them off,” Bucky says.

“Where?” Sam demands, gesturing at the road ahead of them: straight and wide, without so much as a hairpin turn to lose a pursuer. “We’re coming up on—uh, somewhere, I think—”

“Nowhere big enough to throw them off,” Natasha says. “We should just—” She lurches back against her seat as Sam steps on the gas, avoiding a collision by scant inches. “We need to get off the road,” she says, “before they do it for us.”

They pass the sign for the next exit and Sam turns onto the ramp sharply enough that Bucky’s thrown against his seatbelt. “We can’t go into town,” he protests, “she just said it’s not—”

“We can’t drive into the corn, either,” Sam says tightly. He takes them down the ramp and runs the red light at the deserted intersection; the van follows. “But maybe they’ll behave themselves for a little longer—give us some time to get away.”

From the glimpses Bucky catches of the town, it’s not quite populous enough for anyone to be alarmed at the way they’re speeding down the main street—which he’s grateful for, faintly, as he clutches the back of the driver’s seat with increasing alarm. There’s nowhere to go but back to the highway, he thinks, unless whoever’s in the van decides on a shootout in one of the weed-infested parking lots—

Sam takes another tight turn down a side street Bucky hadn’t noticed, heading away from town. There’s no more corn out here: they’re barreling along a dirt road flanked by fallow fields, and the van rounds the corner behind them with a crunch of gravel.

“Speed up,” Steve barks, “go as fast as you can.” Sam obeys and Bucky and Steve turn as one to watch the van recede suddenly, the dust from their tires obscuring the view. Bucky guesses they’ve got thirty seconds before the van recovers and catches up to them—but Steve says, “Quick, pull over. Get down and give me a gun.”

Sam’s already off the road by the time Steve’s finished speaking and they all register his last words. He puts on the brakes and stares at Steve, wide-eyed, even as the van speeds past them. “What are you gonna—?”

A hundred yards ahead, the van stops. Bucky sees the passenger door open; he can only guess at the driver’s side, but he flinches away without waiting to see more. Ducks behind Sam’s seat without thinking, reaching for the gun at his belt. Someone else’s hand there—and Steve takes the weapon from him and flicks the safety off—sure, quick movements, his jaw set and taut, something in his eyes black as the metal itself—

“Jesus Christ,” Sam groans as Steve shoulders the door open, falling into a crouch outside the car. Bucky squeezes out after him, weaponless, hissing: “Steve, what the fuck are you—”

They hear the van door slam and Steve is up and standing before the sound fades. Something lands in the dirt beside Bucky, and he looks around to see Natasha’s pistol lying there, and she’s got her door half-open still but she’s not looking at him, she’s watching something in front of the car—Bucky looks back and pushes himself to his feet and around the fender, and all at once he sees the agents, both of them with their guns out and the closer one facing off with Steve, who takes a step forward and fires—

The woman goes down, dead or close to it, and Bucky finally manages to bring his own gun up. Steve’s walking toward the second agent, a grizzled man whose weapon is pointed at Steve, the range point-blank: but his face is a riot of dawning horror and his arm is shaking. “Fuck,” he says, a throaty gasp, “it’s you—” And then Steve’s shot takes him in the head and he crumples, his pistol clattering out of his hand as he goes.

The silence afterward has a numbing effect, and the scene takes on the look of a tableau vivant to Bucky’s eyes: the first agent’s hand upturned toward the sky, Steve’s hair the color of cornsilk in the sun, the dark, muddy stains on the dirt. Steve turns back, and his face is closed-off and hard as iron; he isn’t looking at Bucky, but past him.

The car door slams and Bucky snaps back to reality to see Sam approaching the van, motioning with his gun to Steve who flanks the vehicle on the other side. It’s empty: they search it quickly, but there’s not so much as a mousetrap waiting for them.

Bucky gathers himself and goes to search the second agent for a clue as to how they were followed, but there’s nothing in his pockets but a couple knives and a pack of cigarettes. He looks over at Natasha to see her pulling from the vest pocket of the woman something small and black with a blinking red light. “Bingo,” she says.

“What is that?”

“Looks like a tracker,” she says, holding it up to her eyes. After a moment’s inspection, she grinds it under the heel of her boot.

“Did they plant something on us?” Bucky asks, handing back her gun.

She shakes her head. “Must have been keyed to the USB drive,” she says, and taps her jacket pocket. “Activated when I tried to hack it—I knew that was a risky move.” She bends back over the woman and resumes her search. “At least we know now, though.”

“Know what?”

She looks up, brushing her hair back from her face. “That we’re onto them. There’s something HYDRA doesn’t want us to find.” The corner of her mouth twitches. “And maybe we’re getting close, if they’re sending agents out after us. All we need is a little more time.”

Time, Bucky thinks, is not something they seem to have a lot of anymore—but that train of thought is cut off as Steve approaches from the other side of the van, the gun held out in front of him. It takes him a moment to realize Steve’s giving it back. Bucky takes it, their fingers brushing in the exchange, and he shivers: the gaze Steve turns on him is still so remote as to be unfamiliar. “Hey,” Bucky says, more loudly than he needs to, “that was some quick thinking. Nice job, pal.”

Steve blinks and seems to come back to himself somewhat. “I—” He frowns. “I didn’t mean to disobey. There wasn’t time—”

“You saved us,” Bucky interrupts, reaching out and grabbing Steve’s hand to steady him, noting with relief that he doesn’t flinch. “Again. You didn’t disobey.”

“I took your gun,” Steve says.

“Thank God,” Bucky insists, a nervous laugh bursting out of him, and Steve does flinch at that. “No, it’s—hey, Stevie, it’s just me, okay?” He waits till Steve looks at him. “You want me to punish you for disobeying? Is that it?”

Steve hesitates. “No,” he says, sounding almost like a question.

“Good, because I’m not gonna.” There’s something in him that wants to ruffle Steve’s hair, some forgotten part of himself that doesn’t belong on this dusty, bloody road—as if Steve is a foot shorter and hell-bent on arguing. His breath catches in his chest. “You sure, though?” he asks, desperate not to lose the moment, incongruous as it is. “‘Cause if you want more of a fight, I bet I could take you.”

The grin that breaks over Steve’s face is like a punch to the gut, even knowing he asked for it, even wanting it as bad as anything—it leaves Bucky aching. “Put your money where your mouth is,” he says, one hand sweeping his hair back from his face. “I can do this all day.”

“Well—” Bucky jerks his head toward Natasha. “Romanoff might not like it if we wrestle out here, but I’ll take you up on that later.” He hardly knows what he’s saying, the relief is as heady as an actual fight and he feels himself falling into it—all the words are just lines he’s sure he’s said before, but he thinks it might be the first good thing he’s felt since 1943.

But Steve’s gaze follows his, and the expression, the whole shining moment, vanishes as quickly as it came. “We should,” Steve says, his brow starting to furrow, “we should hide the bodies.”

Bucky stares at him for a second, as if he could bring back that smile just by wishing, but it’s gone. “No time,” he says, grief making him brusque. “We’ve gotta get out of here.”

Sam steps out of the van then, almost between them, and hands Bucky a rag. “You’re right about that,” he says. It’s impossible to tell how much he heard of their conversation; he’s all focus. “Get wiping.”

Natasha’s finished her search, so Bucky gets rid of the fingerprints on both bodies. Steve stands over him as he works, his expression unreadable—not distant, like before, but withdrawn, his eyes following each movement. He’s silent as they get back in the car and drive carefully away from the scene, taking random turns among the endless fields until they finally wind up back on the highway.

When Steve does speak, it’s in a voice that’s strangely hushed, pitched low enough that it’s difficult to hear over the noise of the road. “He recognized me,” he says, “that agent.”

Bucky sees it again: the wide eyes, the man’s stubbled jaw falling open, a high-definition replay he can’t look away from. “Yeah.”

He frowns at Bucky. “I always wore a mask. He never—he shouldn’t have known.”

He’s asking a question without asking, and Bucky knows what it is, but he doesn’t think he can answer. It’s a miracle, he thinks, that it hasn’t come up before—that no one at the gas stations or motels has identified them. “How far back do you remember?” he asks finally.

“I—I’m not sure,” Steve says. He glances to the window, up to the front seat, and back to Bucky. “It’s not—I don’t know the years, but I remember the early missions and—the training.”

Bucky doesn’t miss the quaver in his voice when he says it. He casts a glance of his own into the front seat, but neither Sam nor Natasha appears to be listening in; they’d have to try if they wanted to hear, Steve is talking so softly. “What about before the training?” he asks.

Steve shakes his head. “Nothing,” he says. “Just you. And—flashes of some other things.”

He stops then, unwilling or unable to say more. Bucky wants to press him, _just you_ ringing in his ears like a gunshot, but he reins himself in because of the look Steve’s giving him, half confused and half fearful. “Before HYDRA—trained you,” he says, “a lot of people knew you.”

“Was I the Asset?”

“No,” Bucky says, “not yet, you were—” He falters, not sure how much is safe to say, uncertain how much Steve would understand if he were to say it. And there is something selfish, too, that stops him from saying anything that might cause Steve to withdraw from him again. “You were a soldier,” he says.

“And you were there?”

Again, Bucky glances toward the front seat. “Yeah, we—we were a team.”

“I remember,” Steve says, “a little.”

The quiet way he says it—quiet not just in volume, but so tentative, with so much doubt—Bucky thinks it would be better, almost, if Steve were to tell him flatly that he doesn’t remember anything, that their past and the truth and non-truth of it is lost to him. That it exists only inside Bucky now. At least it would end the waiting, the almost-memories that only seem to make the pain sharper.

But he doesn’t say any of that—he says, “Like what?”

There’s a moment, then, in which Steve just looks at him—curious, almost. “I think,” he says, “it’s the same thing I remembered before. In Missouri. It’s you and me and we’re in a room, just the two of us. And there’s all these people outside, talking and shouting, but you’re—we’re not doing anything. We’re just sitting there. And you’re just looking at me. You remember that?”

“Sure I do,” Bucky says, chilled; it’s the detail of people outside that does it. He can still hear the radio: _with confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people—I ask that the Congress declare_ —

“I was—smaller, then,” Steve says, “right? Weak.”

The shift takes Bucky by surprise. “You were sick a lot,” he allows. “You didn’t like to be called weak.” And he hadn’t been, Bucky recalls; he remembers how hard Steve could fight, the wiry strength of him, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at him.

Steve snorts. “I couldn’t always make it up the stairs. I don’t know what you—”

“You weren’t weak,” Bucky insists, forcefully enough that Steve startles and Natasha stirs in her seat, looking around and then away again. “I’m sorry,” he says, more softly, “but you were never weak.” He shakes his head: not just the wiry spitfire power, but the look in his eye, blazing, daring anyone to step up and have a go. “You’re the strongest person I know,” he says. “Sometimes I think I’ve spent my whole life trying to be as strong as you.”

He hadn’t meant to say it, or at least not precisely that, and he doesn’t expect the change in Steve’s face, from disbelieving to nothing short of amazement and then, slowly, to something that approaches—well, Bucky doesn’t know. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen Steve look at him like this before. “I know why they made me forget you,” Steve says, as if he’s just now realizing it.

Bucky’s throat is dry; he swallows. “Why’s that?”

“Because you—” A crooked smile flickers over Steve’s mouth and he shakes his head. “Maybe it’s because you were the first of my handlers. But I just—you talk, and I believe you. I’d do anything you asked.”

It’s enough, suddenly, to make Bucky sick, to bring a bitter, acid taste to his mouth. “Don’t tell me that,” he says, but he hears himself and realizes even that is an order. And he knows that the thin veneer of Steve’s belief could be all that’s keeping him from killing them, knows how desperately Steve is clinging to that imagined truth because Bucky himself has clung to weaker truths to keep afloat—but this, he doesn’t think he can bear to hear.

———

**APPROX. LOCATION: JULESBURG, COLORADO**

“Not even a scratch,” Bucky says, his hands on his hips. “Damn. You’d make a good getaway driver.”

Sam snorts, squinting at the car. “Well, they still caught us. It’s Steve you should be thanking.”

Bucky peers at Sam. In the slanting evening light, the sunset tipping toward gold, his expression is hard to read. “I did thank him.”

“I heard you,” Sam says. He reaches out and scratches at a spot of dirt on the side mirror with his thumbnail, keeping his eyes down. “This is fucking with him, man.”

“What is?” Without lifting his head, Sam looks at him, a sideways glance that Bucky still can’t interpret. “What are you talking about?”

“Did you hear him back there?” Sam asks, waving a hand in the general direction of the road. “In that field? He’s confused. All of this—what we’re doing—” Sam frowns. “It’s messing with his head, and sooner or later it’s gonna get us all in trouble.”

“What do you mean?” Bucky demands. “Are you saying you think he’s gonna—turn on us, or—?” This, he thinks, is something he’d expect to hear from Natasha, not Sam—and not after Steve’s proven himself so clearly on their side. “I thought we were past this.”

Sam turns to him fully, leaning on the car. “We are,” he says. “Call me crazy, but I don’t think there’s a thing you could say to him to make him your enemy at this point.” The sour note is still plain in his voice, and it could just be the stress of the day, the weariness of the hunt, but there’s something a little too knowing in Sam’s gaze, his words too close to what Steve said in the car for Bucky’s comfort. “But all it takes,” he says, “is one mistake. Doubt at the wrong moment.”

This, Bucky hadn’t considered—but he wonders if maybe he should have. They’ve worked together like a well-oiled machine so far, with barely an injury between them. But now he thinks of Steve’s loss of control in the base, of how close they came on the side of the road today. If Steve had taken even a couple of seconds longer, they’d be dead. He sets his jaw. “So what do you want to do about it?”

“I think—” Sam shakes his head. “You need to stop lying to him. Get it into his head that you’re not his handler.”

Bucky stares. “You think that’s going to make him less of a danger? From where I’m sitting, it’ll just be a distraction.”

“Fighting a war you don’t understand is a distraction.” He levels a challenging gaze at Bucky. “You’re telling me you can’t sympathize with that?”

“I understand what I’m doing,” Bucky shoots back, “I always have. I’ve been doing it longer than you.”

Sam grimaces. “And you’re the saddest son of a bitch I’ve ever met.” He says it like he means it, and something of the shock must show on Bucky’s face, because Sam’s shoulders drop slightly. He takes half a step forward. “You’re not doing him any favors by hiding the truth,” he says, his voice softer than before.

There’s something in his eyes—like he knows, Bucky thinks, though it’s absurd—like he knows all the truths Bucky wants to tell but can’t. He looks away. “Easier said than done,” he says. “Every time I try to tell him, it’s like he just—refuses to understand.” He remembers the wall that went up each time before: in Mississippi, in Missouri. “Like he doesn’t even hear me.”

“Maybe—” Sam stops, looking pained. “Maybe you’re not saying it right.” He winces at the look Bucky gives him. “I hear you, always trying to get him to remember stuff—well, try harder.” He raises one eyebrow. “Maybe tell him about what you remember.”

Like a bad dream, Bucky’s mind returns to the conversation in the car. _I tried,_ he thinks, wants to shout it at Sam and up to the sky; he tried, and it felt like dying, to have Steve in front of him and yet miles away, looking at splintered fragments of the past and seeing them with entirely different eyes. He spent years forgetting, long decades rolling by and burying it all: and he’d pretty much finished the job by the time Steve showed up. He looks at Sam, the stubborn insistence in his gaze, and he says— “It’d take a lifetime.” His voice a hair’s breadth from trembling, the desperation a deep ache in his gut. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

———

They were supposed to be in Nebraska by now, Bucky thinks, gazing with a dull frustration at the vending machine, the can stuck just on the verge of falling. In Nebraska and ready to get started on the next job, or at the very least resting up for a fresh start in the morning. Instead they’re just south of the state border and, as far as Bucky can see, miles from even knowing how to crack the base when they get to it. He kicks the vending machine, which does nothing, then seizes the machine by the sides and jostles it as hard as he can. The can falls into the tray at the bottom with a loud _thunk._

The only other sound in the parking lot is crickets, the darkness pressing in against the pool of lamplight when Bucky straightens up with the can. He turns it around in his hands, wondering if it’s worth going back to the room, if he’ll be able to get some sleep or if Sam will want to have another conversation. He’d consider spending a night in the car if it wouldn’t lead to more questions.

On the other hand—maybe it’s worth it for an evening’s peace. He heads around the side of the building, toward the shadowy corner where they parked. Then he stops as he hears Natasha say, “Not HYDRA, exactly—but close. They took me when I was a kid.”

“They trained you?” It’s Steve’s voice, pitched low, as hers is, but it carries in the stillness of the night.

“Chokeholds, shooting puppies, the whole nine yards.” Steve makes a wordless noise—disgust or something darker, Bucky isn’t sure—and Natasha gives a dry chuckle. “Only good thing about it is that I got the chance to use it all against them.”

There’s silence for several moments. Bucky hopes he’s accidentally wandered into the tail end of the conversation, that they’re done now. Then— “When you—defected,” Steve says, an anxious edge to his voice audible even at this distance, “how did you—what did you—?”

A soft sound: Natasha sighing. “You know, there’s not really a manual,” she says. “But I know I needed all the help I could get.” She pauses, then says, in answer to some unspoken question, “My friend Clint—my C.O., too, funnily enough. He’d kill me if he heard me say it, but that’s Fury for you.” She snorts. “But really it was Clint who pulled me out. He saved my life before I ever did anything for him.” Her voice is—quiet, softer than Bucky’s ever heard it, and though there’s still that core of iron underneath, he knows he isn’t supposed to be hearing this. “And now Sam,” she says, sounding amused. “I don’t even think he realizes it.”

Bucky supposes he shouldn’t be surprised that he isn’t on the list—competent as Natasha is, he wouldn’t lean on her, either. He hesitates, wondering if he should interrupt them or just go up to the room—

“I don’t think that would work for me,” Steve says. He doesn’t sound upset, exactly; in fact, his voice is neutral to the point of disinterest. But Bucky thinks he’s getting to know that tone now, the conflict that underlies it.

“Come on,” Natasha says, teasing now. “No reinforcements at all?”

“The only person I know is Bucky,” Steve replies.

“Well, there you go.”

“I’m not supposed to...” Steve trails off. “It’s not in the protocol, to talk about—things like that.”

Natasha makes a faint noise of exasperation. “Barnes,” she says, something in her voice that Bucky can’t quite place, “has been alone for a long time. He might appreciate it if you tried.”

There’s a beat. “You think he needs _my_ help?” Steve says, as if the thought is completely foreign. Natasha must say something too low to hear, because Steve speaks again, sounding defensive. “I can’t help—anyone. I can’t even help myself.” No, Bucky thinks, not defensive—he sounds scared. He’s saying something else, quieter, but Bucky doesn’t hear the words. He feels sick at the sound of that fear, knowing where it comes from, that in Steve’s eyes Bucky is as likely to hurt him as help him. And that he won’t talk to Bucky about it—of course not. He’s dizzy, suddenly, with a rush of horror and anger, though just who he’s angry at, he can’t say.

“That’s what I mean,” Natasha’s saying, that jaded amusement back in her voice.

Bucky’s heard enough. He walks around the corner, making no move to soften his steps, pulling the tab on the can as he goes and letting it snap loudly open. He sees the two of them leaning against the hood of the car, facing into the darkness of the empty lot next to the hotel. Their heads whip around as one at his approach. “Hey,” he says, taking a swallow from the can and hoping that it masks his uneven voice. “Late night?”

Steve pushes off of the car at once, standing unmoored in space as if he wants to snap to attention but isn’t sure if he should. Natasha, on the other hand, levels a bland smile at Bucky: no hint of teeth, but it feels like a threat all the same. “You shouldn’t drink those things before bed,” she says. “They’ll give you indigestion.”

“I was in a car chase today,” Bucky shoots back. He holds her gaze, meets it though she’ll see right through him and know that he heard it all. The horror is still coursing through him, lingering in his fingertips and making his heart pound. “I think I deserve a treat.”

———

**APPROX. LOCATION: BREWSTER, NEBRASKA**

The warehouse, Bucky thinks, is an unlikely pick, even for HYDRA. It’s too far out of town to be a top choice for squatters either, to be sure, but it’s practically falling down: foreclosed for a decade, according to the battered sign at the side of the road, all the windows boarded up. On the other hand, they’ve been fooled before. He draws his gun as they approach, all the same.

The overgrown parking lot outside is dotted with rusted cars, twisted machinery, and a beat-up refrigerator. Bucky hunches behind a badly-dented pickup truck and surveys the building. “No one outside,” he says to the others, squinting, scanning for any windows left open, any hint of movement. “Maybe they’re not expecting us.”

“Kind of a weird place for a secret operation, don’t you think?” Sam mutters. “You’re sure this is the spot?”

“This is where the coordinates led.” Natasha looks at Steve. “Does it look familiar?”

He shakes his head, frowning at the building. “They could have laid mines,” he says, “like in Colorado. Or rigged up some kind of trip wire.”

Sam grimaces. “Yeah, and they could be watching us right now. We should’ve come at night.”

“We can’t afford to wait,” Bucky says. “They’ll just send another team after us.” He gives the building another once-over, but it’s all quiet. Well: nothing else for it. He moves forward, keeping out of sight among the wreckage. He hears someone—Sam, he thinks—hiss words after him, but he can hear them following, so he doesn’t look around.

Closer, he can see that the big metal loading door is intact and fully shut. To one side, though, there’s a smaller service door, and it’s ajar.

“That’s a trap,” Natasha whispers, coming up behind him.

“Maybe,” he says. “You got a better idea?”

She nudges him in the back. “After you.” Behind her, Steve is continuously surveying the building, his eyes narrowed, his jaw clenched.

Bucky steps out, into the open space between the lot and the building itself. He moves quickly, Natasha behind him; the concrete exterior is warm against his back. His head poking out from behind the nearest car, Sam motions for them to keep going. Bucky steps sideways, toward the door, only shadows visible inside.

“Go,” Natasha breathes.

He pushes off against the wall and eases the door open—or tries to. The hinges squeak and the sound jolts through Bucky like a bolt of lightning, grating and far too loud. One hand clenches around his gun, the other going unconsciously for the knife in his belt—behind him, he hears Natasha gasp—

But there’s no attack in response, no sudden movements beyond their own. Bucky blinks, his breath coming fast, and looks around at the warehouse, which is lighter than he expected, sunlight filtering down through broken ceiling panels high above. It’s also undeniably empty.

Natasha lets out a disbelieving huff of breath. “Well,” she says, “shit.”

Bucky meets her gaze, sees the grim certainty there mirroring his own. He can’t muster any words, and after a moment she sticks her head back outside and motions for the other two to come in. Bucky doesn’t listen to their dismay, but he feels it all the same. He keeps sweeping the space with his eyes, as if another pass might reveal something more than litter and weather-worn wooden pallets, all the corners shadowed but filled only with dirt and cobwebs.

It’s Sam who says, after several minutes, “We must have the wrong coordinates.” He looks to Natasha. “Come on, let’s go back to the hotel, we can try that flash drive again—”

“They’ll just track us down again,” Bucky says. He can hear the urgency in Sam’s voice, the energy of coming up with another plan, the next step, but he can’t find it within himself.

“So what?” Sam demands.

“It’s a dead end.” Bucky nudges an empty beer bottle with his boot, watches it roll away across the floor. He knows the others are staring at him, and he doesn’t have to look at Sam to see the expression on his face, the indignation, but all he feels is—exhaustion. “We try that drive again, it’s just going to lead us back here.”

“Enough of that,” Natasha says, her voice full of exasperation bordering on contempt. “Wilson’s right, I could have it wrong.”

“You don’t,” Steve says sharply. He’s staring around, turning on the spot, and then he looks back to see all of them watching him. “Someone was here.”

“What?” Natasha asks, quick, like the snap of a whip. “How can you tell?”

“The dust,” Steve says, gesturing vaguely toward the building as a whole. “It’s uneven.”

There are no footsteps across the floor apart from their own, no tracks from anything that Bucky can see, and so it takes him a moment, but then he realizes—there isn’t any dust at all outside of the corners. Enough trash so it looks uninhabited, but the actual dirt is only collecting around the inner edges of the space.

Natasha lets out a huff of laughter. “Sneaky,” she says, sounding almost impressed.

“There,” Sam says suddenly, and he takes several quick steps forward: “See?” He points at the ground in front of him, at what appears to be just another seam in the concrete floor panels. But it is, Bucky sees, lower than the rest—uneven by less than an inch, but it’s enough. He’s surprised for a moment that Sam spotted it, but he supposes all that practice at surveillance from above must pay off. His heart begins to pound.

Steve comes forward as well, gazing down at the mismatched panel. “It’s a door,” he says. He drops to one knee and runs his fingers over the surface, around the edges. “It’s not concrete,” he says, “I think we could probably force it—”

“Should we, though?” Natasha looks between the three of them, pitching her voice lower. “The amount of noise that’ll make—whoever’s down there will know we’re coming.”

“With how loud that door creaked,” Bucky points out, “they might already.”

“We don’t need to make sure of it.” She shakes her head. “Let’s just—keep combing the place. If there’s a door, there’ll be a way to open it. One that’s a little more subtle than ringing the doorbell.”

Bucky looks around at the clutter, the dim shadows. “We don’t have time,” he says. He glances back to the door, the sight of it like an electric charge to his system, the certainty of knowing what they have to do. “It could take anything to open it quietly—it’s probably not as simple as just pressing a button. Even once we find the thing, we can’t just sit around trying to crack their code. The longer we delay, the more time they have to catch us up here.”

Natasha gazes at him for a moment, silent. He can tell she wants to argue, and yet—maybe it’s the eerie silence in the warehouse, or the lingering horror of the shootout by the side of the road. Maybe it’s just the long days wearing on all of them, stringing together so that she, too, just wants to do _something._ “How are you going to open it, then?” she asks, one hand on her hip.

Bucky hesitates, then crouches down and puts his own hands on the false panel. “You’re right,” he says to Steve. “It’s not concrete, but we’re gonna need—” He looks up, searching, and his eyes land on an overturned, cobwebbed metal table shoved against the wall. “Hold that steady for me?” he asks, moving toward it.

Steve follows him, not asking why or what Bucky plans to do, just taking hold of the other end of the table and bracing his body against it. Bucky grips the least-rusted leg in both hands and shoves it to one side, then pulls it back. Again, the metal groaning faintly. He makes fleeting eye contact with Steve as he steadies himself and pushes again, and he wonders at the compliance: if Steve is simply following orders, or if there’s something more. If maybe Steve remembers what it was like in the war, how they could work together like a single being, tossing a gun back and forth and on occasion even the shield—

The leg wrenches off with a grating noise, and they go back to the panel. Bucky shoves the wondering to the back of his mind; he can’t afford the distraction. He looks up at Natasha and Sam, both of whom have their guns out, standing a couple feet back from the panel and shifting lightly on their feet. “Ready?” They nod.

Bucky jams the tapered, broken end of the leg into the edge of the panel and pries it open, or tries to. He tries again, but it barely budges, the plate moving so slightly that he thinks he might have imagined it. It’s heavier than he expected, and he wedges the leg in again, throwing the weight of his frustration behind it.

“Got it—” Steve lunges forward and sticks his fingers in the slowly widening gap, scrambling for purchase, Bucky leaning on the table leg so that the panel doesn’t shift again and pin his hand. With a groan of effort, Steve hauls the panel up, but it stops partway, still too narrow for any of them to pass through. “It’s stuck,” he says, his knuckles white where he’s gripping the edge.

Bucky drops the prybar and adds his weight as well, pushing in the same direction as Steve is pulling. There’s a harsh squealing noise, the metal grinding against itself, but it’s moving—further, further—the panel shuddering under his hands—

He falls back, his fingers throbbing. The panel stays where it is, bent up and aside, warped out of shape. There are warped guides clinging to the underside, as if the whole thing had been meant to slide smoothly away, beneath the panel next to it. Steve, across from him, meets his eyes with a breathless satisfaction verging on triumph, and Bucky’s stomach clenches. He looks away, down into the space that’s opened up where the panel was, aware of Natasha and Sam peering nervously over his shoulder. But there’s nothing there, no weapons rising to meet them, only silence and darkness.

“Anybody got a flashlight?” Bucky asks.

Natasha does, of course, and shining the weak beam into the open panel shows a short drop onto stairs leading down into further shadow. When no one moves, she gives a short sigh and lowers herself in. Standing inside, her eyes are about even with the floor. “Come on in, fellas,” she says, in that sly tone Bucky’s come to associate with danger, “the water’s fine.”

They’re on the second step down when the lights flick on—“Classy,” Sam mutters—flickering and then holding steady, illuminating pale concrete walls not unlike the tunnels in the base in Colorado. They continue down the stairs, so narrow that they have to pass single-file. As they go, Bucky tries to guess at what they’re about to find: another empty base, another chair, another dead end.

Then they turn the corner, and he sees—he’s only partly right. Extending ahead of them, running what looks to be the length of the warehouse above, is a low-ceilinged room lit by bluish fluorescent bulbs. Long metal tables are set up at even intervals, littered with objects that refract the light. Along the walls are empty shelves and counters, stools and swivel chairs here and there like islands. Bucky’s lungs feel emptied of air, looking at it all. There’s no chair here, nothing as outright sinister as he dreaded, but for all that it’s empty, it certainly doesn’t seem like a dead end.

Sam breaks the silence. “What the hell,” he breathes. “Is HYDRA running college chem labs now?”

He’s right, Bucky realizes with a jolt. They’ve walked into a laboratory, almost entirely empty of equipment but unmistakable now that Sam’s pointed it out. Farther down the room, he spots what looks like a burner on its side, and closer up, he can see those objects scattering the light for what they are: test tubes, beakers, dully glinting metal tongs. Everything is in a state of disarray, and though he hasn’t spent much time in a lab, he can tell that this one is mostly empty. What’s on the tables seems to have been left behind. “They left in a hurry,” he guesses.

“Maybe they knew we were coming,” Natasha says. She walks slowly down one of the aisles between the tables, her fingers trailing along the tabletops, picking up an object here and there and inspecting it. “I don’t like this,” she says when they’ve all picked their way about halfway down the long room.

“No shit,” Bucky says.

She shoots him an exasperated look. “It reminds me of—some work I did a long time ago, before I was with SHIELD. Assignments in Siberia. We ran into some pretty nasty stuff.”

There’s a dark edge to her voice, more than the reluctance she always shows when she talks about her past. It puts a chill in Bucky’s blood. “Like Lansdale?” he asks. Sam looks around, a beaker frozen in his hand.

“Kind of,” she says, but doesn’t elaborate.

“You think they were—?” Bucky doesn’t finish the question, but by the look on her face, he knows he doesn’t need to. God, he hopes he’s wrong—he hopes they both are. There hadn’t been a lab in Lansdale, but there had been the same bluish light, the same lingering air of something forbidden.

Looking as troubled as Bucky feels, Sam sniffs the beaker in his hand, then holds it out across one of the tables to Natasha. “You know what that is?”

She sniffs it and shakes her head. “Barnes?”

Bucky takes the beaker. Inside, he sees some kind of dry, bluish residue, as if a liquid has evaporated. It smells—familiar, he thinks, sharp and faintly bitter. “I’m not sure,” he says. “It’s familiar, but I can’t tell how I know it.” He turns, intending to offer it to Steve, but sees that he’s another third of the way down the room, scanning the tables as if he actually knows what he’s looking for. Bucky hurries to catch up.

By the time they reach the end of the room, he’s convinced there’s nothing to find. He guesses the others feel the same, and then Natasha says— “The longer we go without finding anyone, the worse it’s going to be when we do.”

Sam sighs and sits down in the nearest swivel chair, spinning slowly on the spot. “It could still be a trap,” he points out. “Like you said before.” But there’s no urgency in his voice, and he’s not peering into all the corners anymore.

“A trap has to actually snap shut at some point,” Natasha says. “There’s—there’s really no one here, not even a skeleton crew like in Colorado.”

Sam chews on his lip. “Maybe they’re waiting for us back at the motel.”

Bucky glances over at Steve, poking through a jumble of test tubes on the end of one of the tables. “Well?” he asks quietly, and Steve looks at him. “Any of this mean something to you?”

Steve shakes his head. “Nothing’s familiar.”

“I didn’t just mean that,” Bucky says. Natasha and Sam are still debating the likelihood of a trap, paying barely any attention to them. He turns away from the tables, leaning on the end, and sees a storage closet set into the wall that he hadn’t noticed before. A closet with a lock on the handle. Why not, he thinks. Better safe than sorry. “You know how HYDRA works,” he says, turning the handle, surprised when the door swings open on silent hinges. “And you’re smart. Can you think of any reason they’d just abandon a lab like this?”

Steve is silent for a moment. Bucky lets him think as he peers into the darkness behind the door. It seems bigger inside than a closet has any right to be, and on a hunch he reaches to the inner wall and finds the light switch there. The light flickers on with the usual buzz, illuminating—

“If they didn’t know we were coming,” Steve says, “then maybe they finished what they were working on. Or maybe they couldn’t figure it out, and they’ve moved on to trying something else.” He pauses. “Do you think this has something to do with that plan you were talking ab—”

He stops talking as he steps up to look over Bucky’s shoulder, falling silent as he, too, sees what’s in the closet—or the room, Bucky supposes. It’s not much bigger than a closet, really, but there’s enough space for the bare, lopsided mattress and a reeking metal pail. The sight of it strikes a chord of terror in Bucky, sends him halfway back to Azzano in the space of two seconds, and for a moment he’d swear he can smell the burning. “Hey,” he says, “come check this out.”

He moves forward without thinking, though it’s clear there’s nothing else to see in the cell: the walls and floor are bare, devoid of shelves or loose blocks with which to hide anything. He can hear Natasha and Sam behind him, squeezing past Steve and filling up the small space, but he ignores them, instead shoving the mattress on its side against the wall and scanning the pitted concrete underneath. Nothing. Except—deeper scratches, there, on the wall at the short end of the mattress—he leans closer, trying to make out details with someone blocking half the light behind him. He can just read it, etched into the wall in rough, cramped letters: _Amanda Bailey._

Bucky sits back on his heels. “Isn’t that the name of the kid who went missing?” he asks, twisting to look up at Sam. “The senator’s daughter?” He points at the name, standing up to let Sam take a look.

After a moment, it’s Sam’s turn to look back at him, utter bewilderment on his face.

“What kid?” Natasha demands. “That—Bailey kid, from all those news alerts?” Bucky nods. “What the _fuck,”_ Natasha says, “would her name be doing down here?”

“I have no idea,” Bucky says, his stomach inexplicably knotting; “I mean, why on earth—” He thinks back to the news program they saw in Colorado, the clip of her mother on the Senate floor, and he remembers what Sam had said: _she’s the reason we’re not being hunted by the FBI as well as HYDRA..._

The chair in the last base, he thinks, waiting for them like a ghost made of wires and steel. The man on the side of the road who recognized Steve, the way his face had gone slack with horror. The smell of the vials, that scent of salt and ashes. The trail they’ve been trying to follow since Mississippi—always a step behind. “They,” he says, dread stopping his throat and choking him so he can hardly get the word out. “Oh, God. They’re making—” Sam stands up from his crouch and Natasha is staring at him. “They’re trying to—it’s like what they did in Azzano, in the war,” he says, swallowing hard. “To me. And to Steve. This lab, they’re making a—a serum.” He gestures futilely; his thoughts are racing, his pulse an unsteady quaking within him; he doesn’t think he can say it, doesn’t think he has the words. “The base in Colorado, we thought it was a trap, but it’s—they took that kid, and they brought her here and—and maybe they would’ve brought her there next, if Steve hadn’t—” He looks at Steve, desperate, and Steve meets his eyes and Bucky sees that he does understand.

“They’re making another soldier,” Steve says, and it sounds awful in Steve’s voice, the dead weight of the words and the way they fill all the space in the tiny room. Her room, Bucky thinks, and he pictures the woman from the photograph on the news, can suddenly see her lying on the mattress and scratching her name into the wall. He wonders what she used to do it: a ring, maybe? It’d take a while, more than just a day or two. And all under the threat of discovery and who knows what else, hands cramping, knuckles scraped against the stone: it would have hurt. He doesn’t want to think about it, but the knowledge just keeps coming. The facts are unavoidable, the dots demanding to be connected, each new piece of understanding burning like an ember in his chest.

“Holy shit,” someone says—Sam, stalking past Bucky and out of the room, back into the long laboratory, where he starts searching the tables as urgently as if he were looking for a ticking bomb.

Natasha, still standing there, her expression completely neutral, says, “You’re sure?”

Bucky nods. He wishes he weren’t. He wishes he’d died on the Valkyrie with Schmidt, gone and met an icy end so he wouldn’t have to know this. “They lost—their Asset. So they need a new one.”

“And—” Natasha shakes her head. “Why her?”

Glancing at Steve, Bucky sees he’s looking down at the name, his face half in shadow. “Her mother’s a senator,” Bucky says. “She helped us out after you dumped HYDRA’s files.”

Natasha snorts. “That doesn’t paint a big enough target to kidnap her kid.”

“No,” Steve says. He looks up, a mask on his face to rival Natasha’s, blank as if they’re discussing the weather. “But it’s not about revenge, not like that—they don’t care if no one ever figures it out, as long as they know who she is.” Bucky sees a muscle jump in his jaw, and he shakes his head. “Or who she was.”

Something flickers under Natasha’s impassive expression, then vanishes, wiped quickly and expertly away. She glances to him, and he nods, feeling sick. If he were anyone else, he wouldn’t believe it, but—he knows this twisted irony inside and out, if only in hindsight. “We did figure it out, though,” he says, more harshly than he means to. “We’ll stop them. We’ll get her out.”

Steve glances over his shoulder, at Sam still rifling through the mess of the lab, and then back to Natasha, who meets his gaze stonily. “We have to catch them first,” he says.


	3. Chapter 3

Natasha’s back is straight, her head upright, her eyes wide open and fixed on the road ahead. All the same, Bucky’s lost count of the miles. “You want me to drive?” he asks quietly.

She shakes her head and shifts her hands on the wheel. “I’m good,” she says, “thanks.” She matches his volume, glancing up into the mirror.

Bucky twists to look behind them. The yellow glow of the highway lights shows Sam and Steve slumped against their respective windows, dead to the world. “Are you planning to power through all night?” he asks, settling back into his seat.

“Till the border at least,” she replies. “There’ll be somewhere to stop and switch drivers, if you still want to by then.”

“Sure.” He gazes out the windshield at the empty interstate, trying to place how long they’ve been driving since the base. At least another hour till the border, he figures. “I’m not,” he begins, and hesitates. “Are you sure we’re heading in the right direction?”

He expects her to snap at him, or even ignore the question, but she sighs. “Not really.”

It doesn’t make him feel better.

Then she glances over at him, switching to face forward again as soon as he turns his head toward her. “What are our other options, though?” she asks with a shrug. “Use the drive again, try to get something more off of it? Even if I could, you said it yourself back in that warehouse: they’d just send more agents after us.”

“I know,” he says, dogged. “We could take ‘em, though. We’ve handled everything else they’ve thrown at us.”

“And when they track us,” she says, “and find out we’re getting closer, and they send out everyone they’ve got to stop us—can we handle that, too?”

“We could—” Bucky racks his brain for an idea, any idea. He comes up with nothing, and he knows Natasha knows it. “I just—thought we’d have something more to go on,” he says. “More than a goddamn _packing slip.”_ It’d been tucked nearly out of sight on one of the shelves, most of the words on it meaningless to them but with an unmistakable address. The clearest destination they’ve had in weeks, if only they knew it was the right one.

“Nice to hear I’m not the only one wondering if it was only in that base because it was too unimportant to bother hiding from us.” She sounds amused, in a bleak sort of way.

Bucky pulls the sheet of paper from the dash and scans it again in the half-light. “Lanesboro, Minnesota—you know what’s there? Fucking nothing.”

“Well, not nothing.” He looks over, and the corner of her mouth twitches. “It’s the rhubarb capital of the state.”

“My point exactly,” he says.

She’s silent for a moment. “I know.” She shifts her hands on the wheel again. “But if we don’t take this lead, we’ll have no heading at all.”

Just as before, Bucky knows she’s right. He wonders, though, if she’s holding out hope of finding anything in Minnesota, or if it’s just him who’s all but given up. He thinks of all the dead ends they’ve met with so far: this could just be another one. They’ve driven so late into the night, through miles and miles of mostly-empty country, because they finally have something to drive toward, but Bucky—God help him, he can’t quite wrap his head around it. Even knowing what they’re looking for now, it doesn’t feel to him like they’re actually getting anywhere. But he supposes it’s better than sitting still.

Into the quiet, Natasha says, “If there is a base in Lanesboro—do you think we’ll find her there?”

“Million dollar question,” Bucky deadpans. He doesn’t have to wonder who she’s talking about. “Do you?”

“I think,” she says, and pauses. The light of the dash casts uneven shadows over her face. It makes her look softer than Bucky’s used to: he thinks she looks tired, as exhausted as the rest of them are. “I don’t know,” she says eventually. “I was younger than her, when the Red Room took me. I don’t—I can’t remember, really. What it was like.” She hesitates again, as if she’s trying to find the right words. “No one ever trained me to save people.”

She says it more softly than all the rest, so that the words are nearly lost in the noise of the car on the road. Bucky doesn’t know what to say—Natasha’s never spoken directly to him about her past before, and he’s never expected her to. He feels the same sense of wrong-footedness as he did when he overheard her conversation with Steve. “Me neither,” he says, his voice coming out strange. “I think we’re doing all right, all things considered.”

But he thinks, then—he hasn’t done much saving, the last seventy years. Abstractly, maybe. But he’s stuck to fighting, left the rescue missions to others. He thinks he knows what Natasha’s wondering, though she hasn’t come out and said it. And he wonders, too, what they’ll find when they finally locate Amanda Bailey—if they ever do. If they’re equal to the task of helping someone when they’ve hurt so many along the way. If they’ll frighten her.

The silence stretches out, marred only by the low noises of the highway. They pass a sign reading _Welcome to South Dakota._ “Tell you what,” Natasha says, “we’ll stop for breakfast, and then you can drive.”

Bucky looks at the clock: it’s 01:54. “Are you sure you’re good till then?”

“I’m sure.” She straightens her shoulders, shakes her hair back from her face. “Get some sleep, Barnes,” she says, tossing him a quick smile, a slight coolness in her gaze. “You’ll need the rest.”

Bucky isn’t sure how to respond to her brisk return to business, so he doesn’t. He takes another look into the back seat, at Sam still sound asleep, Steve with his mouth half-open. Worry is a knot in his stomach, keeping him from sleep, but he settles back and closes his eyes anyway. His body hums with the motion of the car as the time ticks away, miles and miles speeding by in the darkness.

———

**APPROX. LOCATION: MITCHELL, SOUTH DAKOTA**

The statue is ten feet tall and, thank God, not painted: it’s made of rough-hewn wood gone glossy and dark in the sun. Two figures on a pedestal, far enough from the picnic tables that it could be overlooked, but with a well-trodden path marking it out. Just their luck, Bucky thinks, that in the middle of this empty state, they’d wind up at the one rest stop with a bit of flair. He looks to Sam and Natasha, lingering over their vending machine chips, grateful that they’re talking to each other and taking no notice of where exactly they’ve stopped. Then he looks back at the statue, and his stomach clenches. Steve is walking aimlessly toward it, his hands in the pockets of his cheap thrift store jeans.

By the time he catches up, Steve is standing beneath it, looking up at his own wooden face. It’s not a bad likeness, considering the medium, but the shield is a dead giveaway. The second figure is less recognizable, but then— “Why,” Steve says, “is there a statue of us in the middle of nowhere?”

“It’s like I said,” Bucky manages. “You were pretty famous, before.”

“Anything connected to this place?” Steve asks, one eyebrow raised.

“Well—” Bucky can’t resist a smile. “You made an impression.”

Steve gazes up at the statue a moment longer, then looks at Bucky, squinting against the wind that rolls over the flat expanse of grass. “So did you.”

Bucky shakes his head. Steve can’t know how close he’s coming to the history books, to what places like this are trying to memorialize, but the truth is— “I didn’t do much. I just followed you.”

“I remember,” Steve says. “You were always there, until HYDRA—” He cuts himself off, takes a breath. “Until HYDRA trained me.” He pauses a moment, frowning at the ground and glancing up at Bucky through his lashes. “What did you do,” he asks, “after that?”

Bucky’s first instinct is to answer—it always is, with Steve. But he isn’t sure he wants to talk about that, now or ever, especially not with their own ghosts looming over them like this. “Did Romanoff put you up to this?” he asks.

“No, I—I just want to understand.” It’s as if he’s afraid, suddenly, to look at Bucky directly, responding to some threat Bucky isn’t even aware of making. “I want to know,” he says, still with his gaze half-trained on the ground, “even if I couldn’t be there.”

Bucky glances back at the tables over his shoulder: Sam and Natasha are still talking. He looks back to Steve. “There’s not much to tell,” he says. “I killed Schmidt, saw the war through. Came home.” Though it had felt like an empty city, a foreign country. “Carter—Peggy”—he sees a flicker of something in Steve’s eyes—“she got me set up with SHIELD, and I just—kept going.” He shrugs. “Taking out bad guys, one at a time.” He’s used that line before, and it feels as false now as it always has.

Steve blinks at him. Bucky wonders if he’s going to ask for more, if he’ll have to unearth those years from wherever he’s buried them, but Steve just says, “So you were a soldier the whole time I was.”

It’s a startling comparison, and Bucky isn’t sure he likes it. “It’s not the same,” he says. “It’s just work.”

Though still tentative, Steve’s gaze is clear, piercing keenly down to the bone. “You don’t sound proud of it,” he says.

Well, Bucky thinks—what is he supposed to feel about it? About finding a way through, doing the only thing he knows how? The suggestion gets his hackles up in a way that’s familiar, though he doesn’t think Steve meant it to: but he always did know every chink in Bucky’s armor. “Are you?” he asks, challenging, knowing that it isn’t a fair question.

Steve looks at him a moment, his gaze smoothing to blankness, and then his eyes drop back to the ground. The wind isn’t dying down and it whips up the dust around their feet, tugs on Steve’s hair so that it blows across his face. He stays still and silent for long moments that stretch out into a minute or more. His face is half-hidden, but Bucky knows he’s put on that mask again, and he resents it. “I don’t know what you want me to say,” Steve says at last, pitching his voice to cut through the wind.

“I just want you to tell me the truth,” Bucky says. There is a black desperation clawing up within him, sudden and endless as the grasslands around them, halfway to anger and yet too bitter for it.

“I was the Asset,” Steve says. He won’t look at Bucky, won’t move an inch. “My work was—a gift to mankind.”

The despair is a flood; he chokes on it. “God, Steve—”

“I did what they trained me to do.” Steve speaks quickly and softly, the words nearly lost. He’s looking at Bucky now, a pleading expression on his face. “What you all trained me to do—”

It isn’t about the question anymore. “No,” Bucky insists, so loudly that the sound might actually reach Sam and Natasha; “no, Stevie, I didn’t!” He wants to grab Steve and shake him, wants to throw up with the horror, wants to crush Steve to him and just hold him there. “What do I have to say, huh?” Some awful pressure in his chest, a burning behind his eyes. “What’s it gonna take for you to believe me?”

Steve flinches from him, cringing away as if he’s raised a hand, and though he doesn’t look away, his eyes are wild. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I’m sorry. I just—I didn’t mean—” He takes a breath in, and through the dying wind Bucky can hear the edge of a sob in the sound. “I’m trying to do what you want,” he says, begging. “I’m ready to comply.”

“Stevie,” Bucky says. His voice breaks on the word. He holds Steve’s gaze though it feels like an iron brand, waits until Steve’s breathing has slowed. “You don’t have to comply, if you don’t want to.”

There’s a slight pause. Steve’s gaze flickers away and then back again. “Why wouldn’t I comply?” he asks, the question flat.

It’s despair, now, thick and heavy, filling Bucky’s lungs. He sees the way Steve is standing, one foot back as if ready to run; the trembling of his right hand, the metal shifting in the left. “I’m sorry,” he says. He means it, nearly falls to his knees with it. Steve doesn’t move closer, but he doesn’t drop his gaze, either. It’s more than Bucky deserves, and he clings to it, tries to force the bitterness down and mostly succeeds.

He swallows, makes his voice calm. “If you’re wondering,” he says, “pride doesn’t really come into it. What I’ve been doing since the war, it’s... it was something to do.” He shrugs; as awful as it is, it’s true. “You were gone,” he says. He won’t speak to the bleak span of it, the way the years had stretched out ahead of him just like the train tracks above the ravine. “I had to keep going.”

———

**APPROX. LOCATION: LANESBORO, MINNESOTA**

“And we’ll have to move fast,” Natasha says. “If she’s there, they’ll try to stop us, obviously, but if they can’t—they’ll try to get her out of there.”

Bucky nods, keeping his eyes on the satellite printouts. It’s Sam who states what he’s thinking: “If they get her out, we might never find her again.”

An uncomfortable silence falls, the anxiety twisting sour in Bucky’s gut. He doesn’t want to consider that possibility, though he doesn’t really have any trouble visualizing what will happen if it comes to pass—more months upon months of wandering, taking out any traces of HYDRA in their path until they pick up the trail again. He swallows. “So we won’t let them get out,” he says. “The only road is here, opposite from the actual entrance, so”—he taps the spot on the prints—“we just keep them from getting out to the road. Stop them before they can even take her out the door.”

Sam meets his eyes when he looks up, a dubious slant to his mouth. “When you say it like that,” he says wryly, “it sounds so simple.”

Bucky looks to Steve. “I bet we can do it,” he says, encouraging.

Steve holds his gaze for a couple seconds, then looks out the window at the parking lot. “It’s almost noon.”

They all look: he’s right. The long shadows of the morning have shrunk almost to nothing; a faint breeze rustles the trees at the edge of the lot. High summer and getting hotter, but they can’t afford to wait until the evening. “Guess we should pack up the car,” Bucky says. He stands and starts clearing the table, shuffling the papers together. No need to leave anything behind—if they succeed, they won’t be spending another night here.

To his surprise, Steve follows him out to the parking lot, slinging the last duffel bag over his shoulder. He waits silently while Bucky pops the trunk, then piles it in on top of the others. Bucky takes a moment to make sure everything’s stowed: no weapons poking out to cause suspicion, should anyone notice.

From behind him, Steve says, “What was in Lansdale?”

Bucky freezes momentarily, then forces himself to keep moving. “What?” he asks, checking the zipper on Sam’s bag.

“In the base in Nebraska,” Steve says. When Bucky straightens up and turns at last, Steve’s gaze is keen. “You and Romanoff were talking about something that happened in Lansdale.”

He’d hoped he’d heard wrong, but Bucky supposes he should’ve known better than that—all the same, his stomach churns, thinking about it. “Yeah,” he says heavily, “there was a base there, in some defunct power plant. We thought it’d be a simple job, but there was—they were doing some—terrible things.” He closes the trunk, leans with his hands on the warm metal, but he can feel Steve watching him. “Experimenting on people. Like what they did to me in the war.” He turns his head, meets Steve’s eyes. “What they did to you, with your arm.”

Steve looks down at his arm, at the metal shining in the sun. Bucky wonders, belated, if this is a step too far, if Steve is even aware that this change came from HYDRA and not before. There’s a tightening around his eyes. “What were they doing to them?” he asks in a low voice.

Bucky shakes his head. “We couldn’t tell exactly. They were all dead by the time we got there.” He swallows hard. “Had been for a while.” They’d seen similar things, worse things, even, in the war, and yet—

Steve is watching him closely, some unspoken question on his lips, and Bucky isn’t sure what he’s asking but he can’t help but answer, as always—

“It just seems,” he says, “it seems like—” He looks at Steve, the real, solid presence of him here on the asphalt, in the air shimmering with heat. At the way he’s waiting, patiently, for Bucky to cough up what’s choking him. “I feel like the world gets worse every day,” he says. “Every time I think we’ve found the worst thing a person can do, someone does something worse.” _And I’m tired,_ he thinks but doesn’t say: first Lansdale, now this plot to create a second soldier, and after that who knows how many more? And he’s fighting, he won’t stop, but it’s been such a long time already.

“During my training,” Steve begins, hesitant, “they—they told me that—chaos was a tool. That fear was necessary to build a better world.” He shivers slightly as he’s speaking, and Bucky wonders whether he ever came face-to-face with Zola’s bank of computers, or whether other HYDRA operatives just parroted those lines until Steve learned them. “I believed them.” He’s staring at the ground, but there’s a familiar set to his jaw. “I thought it was the truth, everything they said. They told it to me so many times.” Then he looks up, that old fire in his eyes. “But I don’t think it can be true. That isn’t what you’re doing. You’re going to save that girl.”

“I know,” Bucky says. He knows it; he does. But Natasha’s words from last night’s drive come back to him: _no one ever trained me to save people._ He squints away toward the cars pulling off the highway, the bluffs rising up gray and dark on the opposite side of the road. “I know, it’s just—”

“If you were right,” Steve interrupts, and Bucky looks around, surprised, “if the world was only getting worse—I would’ve killed you when they told me to.” He’s looking at Bucky, and in his eyes there’s the ghost of fear, a tremor to his voice that isn’t only conviction: Bucky wonders if he expects to be punished for saying this. And yet, miraculously, he does say it, and he doesn’t look away. “You’re going to save her,” he says. “We both are.”

———

There are voices up ahead of them, boots squeaking on concrete. And birdsong, jarringly bright against the rush of Bucky’s pulse in his ears. “Go,” someone says out of sight, “fuck, come on, get in, go!”

As he rounds the corner at the bottom of the stairs, there’s a burst of sound that makes Bucky flinch—but it’s not a bullet, it’s a black van knocking out one of its side mirrors as it speeds, tires screeching, away from him. The fourth wall of the room is gone, making some kind of half-hidden garage opening into the trees, and the van hurtles out of it and away down a dirt road.

There’s shouting behind them, too—Sam’s voice calling to Natasha, and the sound of gunfire—but Bucky doesn’t turn. He brings his pistol up and takes aim at the window of the van as it careers around the corner, and shoots. The shot goes wide, hitting the empty, parked car instead as something knocks into him; he tumbles to the floor with someone on top of him, a woman who doesn’t stay to pin him down but scrambles away immediately, toward his gun which has skittered halfway across the room—

Before he can lunge after her, Steve, barreling through the door after him, hauls him up and drags him aside, to relative safety behind a stack of crates. Out of sight, he can hear the agent shouting and other voices answering. In front of him: Steve, his gaze clear and focused, half-crouching in anticipation of taking fire. Bucky pulls his arm out of Steve’s grip. “Give me your gun,” he says.

Steve shakes his head. “We should—”

Bucky turns before he can finish, throws himself out from behind the crates and toward the agents’ voices. There’s no thought in it, only a blind, burning urgency: he lets it propel him forward, toward the agents, and as he goes he sees that there are five of them, no, more—

They’re not expecting his charge and can’t quite take aim in time to stop him. He collides head-on with one of them, tackling the agent and forcing his gun up toward the ceiling. The shot is directly next to his head and it stuns him into momentary deafness, but he grapples the agent to the ground with his ears ringing. He sees disjointed details in the scuffle, graying hair, a scar along the man’s jaw, a hand reaching for his face with fingers outstretched. The gun is between them, pointing everywhere at once, and Bucky wrests it away in the moment that Steve’s voice breaks through the din, shouting his name.

Bucky shoots the agent, feels him jerk and go still, and jumps up. He whirls around to face the other agents and takes aim at the woman who tackled him before, but before he can fire, someone takes him out at the knees and sends him crashing to the ground. Hands holding his arms, pulling his head back by the hair, and he snarls and struggles but can’t break away. Someone takes the gun from his hand, and there’s another pointing directly at him—

The agent is knocked sideways by the force of Steve’s attack, the metal arm flashing, and if the gun goes off, it’s lost in the sound of the agents crying out in surprise. Bucky, still held fast, sees Steve take an agent out with one swing, sees him shoot another in the head without looking, and catches sight of his face: twisted in effort, his teeth bared. The expression is painful to look at, but Bucky doesn’t dwell on it; the agents holding him have loosened their grip in their shock, and he twists around to drive his elbow into someone’s gut.

It’s a blur, then, fighting his way free of the immediate crush of bodies. Somewhere to the side he can hear Steve shout “No—”, and when he turns, he sees Steve lunge for an agent setting his sights on Bucky; there comes the sickening crunch of metal against bone.

Bucky grits his teeth and looks away, back to the agent pinned beneath him: the last, he thinks, though he can’t spare a moment to make sure of it. He traps the agent’s wrist with his knee and flings away the knife swinging toward his throat, hoping vaguely that Steve will be able to get to it. The agent’s free hand is scrabbling around Bucky’s throat without making purchase, and Bucky fumbles to draw the gun from the man’s belt. Before he can take aim, he hears a pained groan and looks around—Steve, blood streaming from his nose, staggering back from the other agent, whose broken arm is curled up to her chest and who pulls her pistol on him in the sudden opening.

Terror constricts Bucky’s throat—a gun fires—the agent under Bucky twists and Bucky looks down in time to receive a fist to the side of the head. He points his gun down, fires, jumps up with the spray still warm across his face. He blinks his eyes clear, aims, and fires again—the woman goes down, the gun clattering to the floor. Bucky lets it lie, ignores the noises the woman’s making. “Steve,” he says, running to him, sinking to his knees in front of where he’s hunched on the floor. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Steve says, his voice low and tight. He’s got his metal hand clamped against his right arm, but he pushes himself upright, gritting his teeth. “She’s still—”

“Jesus,” Bucky says, taking in the blood seeping between Steve’s fingers.

Steve shakes his head. “Why’d you run at them like that?” He spits a bit of blood to one side, though his nose has already stopped bleeding. “What were you thinking—?”

In spite of his worry, Bucky bristles at the accusation. “It was you or me,” he says, but as he speaks he wonders if it’s true—he doesn’t know, really, if he was thinking anything at all.

“If you’d waited,” Steve snaps, “we could’ve worked together.”

Bucky hesitates, thrown by the heat in Steve’s voice, by his own sudden uncertainty. He pushes the doubt down, though, and reaches out, trying to tell how bad the wound is. “Let me see.”

Steve jerks his shoulder away, scowling, and jerks his chin toward the open wall. “They drove off,” he says through a clenched jaw.

Horror turns Bucky’s thoughts sticky and slow, an awful harmony with the agent gasping wetly behind him, but he grasps at Steve’s words. “They must have the kid.” He turns, tears his eyes away from Steve, drops down next to the man he’d fought and starts searching him. Automatic, unseeing; his own fingers slick with blood.

Steve lurches after him. “We gotta go after them,” he says. “If they get away—”

Bucky pulls a set of keys from the man’s pocket. He guesses they go with the remaining van, the one with the damning bullet hole in the middle of the passenger side; he presses the fob dangling from the ring and hears the click of the doors unlocking. And then he looks at Steve: pale, still clutching his arm, unsteady where he stands. “You can’t fight like that,” he says. He sees Steve open his mouth, can already hear the indignant tone he’ll use— “You can’t, Stevie, I mean it. Wilson and Romanoff will handle it.”

“I’ve had worse,” Steve insists, “I can finish the mission—”

Footsteps behind them, and Bucky gets to his feet, realizing too late that his gun is still yards away on the floor—

“What the fuck, Barnes,” Natasha says, slowing as she and Sam enter the room. She takes two quick steps forward and shoots the woman agent in the head. The shot seems louder than the rest, somehow, the birdsong gone, the woman now silent. “Come on,” she says, turning, urgency burning in her tone, “we have to go now—”

“Steve’s shot,” Bucky says. Steve shoves at him with his wounded arm and lets out a hiss of pain. “Stand down,” he says to Steve, steadying him by his shoulder, the muscle there tense, sweat beading on his face. Steve looks at him, his mouth a flat line, but he doesn’t protest. “You go,” Bucky says to Natasha, to Sam, who’s looking anxiously between the two of them. He tosses Sam the keys to the van. “We’ll meet you back at the hotel—go, now!”

“Come on,” Sam says to Natasha, already turning toward the van, reaching for the door handle.

Everything still looks strange and fragmented to Bucky, the aftershocks of the fight: nothing feels quite real, the colors too bright. He watches the van speed out onto the dirt road and vanish into the trees, same as the first—and in the ringing silence, he hears pained breathing behind him. He sees again Steve turning to him in that one soundless instant, the wrench of his body as the bullet hit.

"They can't wait for us," he says to Steve, who's still fixing him with something just short of a glare. "They'd lose the trail."

Steve opens his mouth, but hesitates a moment. Then he says, "We need to get our own car out of here before anyone sees it," his voice hard and featureless as concrete.

———

“I said I’m fine.”

“You always did like to say that,” Bucky replies. “Hold still.” He waits until Steve relaxes, sitting back on the edge of the tub, then rips Steve’s shirt open, exposing clammy skin and a mess of blood on his upper right arm. “Wow,” Bucky says, keeping a tight hold on the fearful instinct that makes his throat clench tight; he takes his cue instead from the clinical, nearly annoyed way that Steve’s surveying the wound. “She got you good, huh?”

There’s a twist to Steve’s mouth that Bucky doesn’t think was put there by pain alone. “I’ve had worse,” he says, the annoyance in his voice achingly familiar. “Should be mission-ready in—ten hours.” The words grow strained at the end, the edge of a groan creeping in.

“Doesn’t mean it hurts any less,” Bucky says, raising one eyebrow when Steve looks at him full-on. “I heal fast, too. I know how it feels.”

Steve gives a one-sided shrug, looking away again. “The bullet went right through,” he says, like it explains something, but his jaw is set.

Bucky sits back on his heels and pulls his bag over, digging through it for the roll of bandages and gauze. “That’s lucky for you,” he says, dry, nearly as impatient as Steve seems to be. He reaches for Steve’s arm without thinking, and hears Steve’s sharp intake of breath. “You want to do it?” he asks, pulling his hand back, profferring the gauze with the other.

Steve shakes his head. “You don’t need to,” he says. “Bleeding’s already mostly stopped.”

Like hell, Bucky thinks, but he just says: “Force of habit.” Steve gives a soft scoff, but he doesn’t move away—and when Bucky reaches out again, he lets it happen.

They’re silent, then, as Bucky cleans and dresses the wound. It’s neat, no jagged edges, no strands of fabric in the way, and Steve stays absolutely still. Someone is singing in the room above them, the melody filtering indistinctly down. Closer, water dripping off of Steve’s fingertips and onto the tile floor.

Wrapping the bandage around Steve’s arm, Bucky realizes that Steve is watching him, his eyes half-closed, his head tilted sideways to lean against the wall. “What?” he asks, not looking up.

“I have training in field medicine,” Steve says quietly. “I’ve dealt with worse than this on my own.” He pauses; Bucky glances up and sees the color high in Steve’s cheeks. “Thank you,” he adds.

Bucky presses his lips together and ties off the bandage, tucking the loose end neatly away. It’s been a long time, but he knows that tone, the grudging gratitude. More than all the times before, he’s hit with a spasm of vertigo, looking at Steve sitting there bloody and bruised and angry, and clearly trying to hide it. The sense of having stood up too fast, everything old and new at once: his eyes linger on the scars threading out from Steve’s left shoulder, and the dizziness increases. “You know, they shot you in France in pretty much the same place,” he says, dropping his hands at last.

The corner of Steve’s mouth twitches. “I think I remember. You cussed me out pretty good while they were stitching me up.”

The singer upstairs is still going: something sweet-sounding, a mellow alto. “You took me by surprise,” Bucky says. “Should’ve guessed you wouldn’t stop picking fights just ‘cause we’d left New York.”

Steve laughs, a short huff of breath. “I got even better at it,” he says.

“You still surprise me, though.” The words slip out without thinking, the post-battle high fading quickly into a swing of heavy exhaustion now that all danger seems to have passed. He eases out of his crouch, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, and lets his head tilt back. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Steve watching him, hears the slight rasp of his breathing. He’s waiting for an explanation, but Bucky isn’t tired enough to give it to him. It wouldn’t help, he thinks, if he were to tell Steve that every moment he remembers hits Bucky like a needle jammed under his fingernails; it wouldn’t help if he said he looked forward to the hurt, if he said he’d rather be shot himself than watch Steve talk through the pain as if Bucky’s never cleaned him up from a fight before. He looks up at the patchy popcorn ceiling and keeps his mouth shut.

The click of metal fingers against the tub, and Steve gets to his feet with a soft, hurting noise that settles in the pit of Bucky’s stomach. “You surprise me, too,” he says, so quietly that the words are nearly lost in the sound of his footsteps as he walks out.

———

Bucky looks over at Steve, frowning at the silent phone on the table and scratching absently through the bandage at the healing skin on his arm. Tension is drawn all through his body, though he can’t be in much pain anymore; he heals even faster than Bucky. As he watches, Steve shoots him a sidelong glance—one of many through the evening—and sets his jaw when he catches Bucky looking back. “What?” he asks.

He sounds—hostile, almost, and it takes Bucky aback. “How are you feeling?” he asks.

“Fine,” Steve says shortly, rolling his shoulder. “Nearly mission-ready,” he adds with a bitter quirk of his mouth.

Bucky can guess at the reason. “They’ll call us if anything comes up,” he says, even as he glances at the phone and wishes in spite of himself that it would ring. “And they’ll be back before long. One day, maybe two, and we’ll know what was in that base. One way or another.” Steve doesn’t seem particularly relieved, scowling as he taps his metal fingers against his thigh. “I get it,” Bucky offers. “I don’t like the waiting any more than you do. I haven’t—well,” he says, just realizing it, “I don’t think I’ve taken a break in the middle of anything like this since—must’ve been the war. When they sent us to London on leave.”

“It’s not the waiting,” Steve says, finally meeting his gaze full-on.

Bucky blinks. “Then what—?”

“You shouldn’t have gone running in ahead of me like that this morning,” Steve tells him. The fierce look on his face matches his heated tone and makes Bucky think, jarringly, of Steve pushing himself up from the pavement, nose and knuckles bleeding, glaring at Bucky as if he’d been the one throwing punches. “You could’ve got yourself killed.”

“I—” Bucky flounders, surprised not only by the sudden accusation but also by his own stab of guilt, followed quickly by a burning indignation. “You saw those agents,” he says, “they were getting away, I had to—”

“They’d already _got_ away,” Steve interrupts, vehement. “Why didn’t you just hang on five seconds? Why’d you throw yourself out there like that?”

Bucky gapes at him. “I was protecting you,” he manages. “They were about to open fire on us—”

“I could’ve handled it,” Steve insists. “I didn’t need your help.”

“Look,” Bucky says, acidic, surrendering to his own anger, “if you want me to just step back and let you fight it out, pal, then I’m sorry but we’re not in Brooklyn anymore—”

“It’s not about _pride,”_ Steve says, like the word itself is dirty. “I’m not—I’m _trained,”_ he says, “not to need help. But instead you ran in and put yourself in danger and I had to protect _you—”_

He’s not shouting, his voice is even, mostly, and yet Bucky’s thrown by the force behind it; the last time Steve spoke to him like that, sparks were raining down around them on the helicarrier. “You didn’t have to,” he protests. “I’m not—God, Stevie.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “You don’t have to put yourself on the line for me. I’m not your handler.”

Steve doesn’t flinch, exactly, but he looks down and away. He’s still frowning. Bucky braces himself for the denial that always comes, the pain of it, and Steve says, softly— “I know.”

Bucky stares, but Steve doesn’t meet his gaze. “You do?”

Still with his eyes on the table, Steve nods. “It makes sense,” he murmurs. “You kept saying you weren’t. And I thought—I mean, you wanted me to obey, but—”

“Only,” Bucky begins, and has to take a breath to control the tremor in his voice. “Only because I was afraid,” he explains. “I thought you would turn on us—”

“I know,” Steve says again, no hint of reproach in his voice, though Bucky feels his face flush with shame. He looks up at last and his expression changes as he looks at Bucky—from distress to something strangely like pleading. “You gave me orders, you wanted me to follow them—but you didn’t want to want those things.”

Slowly, the idea of it is sinking in: Bucky feels as if he’s falling into the Potomac again, solid ground dropping away beneath him, and yet—he shakes his head, unable to reconcile it, the panic and the relief. “You could tell?” he asks, his voice weak to his own ears.

Steve shrugs. “I know what it’s like to fight yourself.”

God. Bucky swallows hard. “I didn’t think you were—I didn’t think they let you know enough to fight back.”

“They didn’t,” Steve says, “but then I saw you.” The words are so simple, he seems almost unaware of what he’s said; he runs his thumbnail along the grooves in his metal palm and sighs. “And I know you.” He looks up with a small smile. “It’s—taking me a while to work out how, exactly, but—I know what makes you happy, I think. And it’s not controlling anyone.” He shakes his head. There’s a warmth in his eyes that gives Bucky that sense of vertigo again, like falling back in time. “So you couldn’t have been my handler,” Steve says, matter-of-fact. As if there’s never been anything but truth between them.

Several seconds pass, silent, as Bucky tries to think clearly and comes up short. Words press up under his tongue but he swallows them down—what is he supposed to say, he wonders, to such a pronouncement? What does Steve want from him, still with that gentle smile on his face? And then—there: the guilt, the barest shadow of what Bucky felt when Steve fell from the train, but doubly sharp. Because it’s the second time, really—Bucky let HYDRA take him, and then he treated him like the monster they’d tried to turn him into. Bucky opens his mouth, still reeling. “Why didn’t you say anything earlier?” he asks. “Why did you let me keep lying to you?”

Steve sits back as if the question surprises him. “At first,” he says, a crease appearing between his brows, “I wasn’t sure. I thought—sometimes they used to trick me.” Though his voice stays calm, Bucky notices the twitch of his fingers on the chair, the metal clicking faintly against the plastic. “It was always to test my loyalty, see if their controls were working.”

He shudders and falls silent. “You thought I was testing you,” Bucky says. It makes sense, he thinks, given everything, but it makes him feel sick to speak the words aloud.

Steve makes a motion somewhere between a shrug and a nod. “For a while. But back there—in the base—you risked your life for me. No handler would do that.” He looks up again on the last words.

Bucky looks away. He can’t meet Steve’s eyes, though he knows there’s no anger in them anymore. He thinks he’d prefer fury, some righteous rage crashing down on him—he feels small and fragile, trembling in his remorse, waiting for the blow. But it doesn’t come. And the mercy is almost worse. “Stevie,” he begins, still not quite knowing what to say. His voice trembles and he can’t hide it. “It wasn’t right,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

Steve’s exhale sounds loud in the quiet room. “I know.”

“Well, I—I am,” Bucky says, daring to look up again, and he finds Steve’s gaze clear. As if he means it, as if— “I lied to you,” Bucky says, looking him full in the face, wanting to see some change, feeling dirty and unworthy of whatever is in Steve’s eyes now.

“You kept trying to tell me the truth,” Steve says, shaking his head.

“Only sometimes,” Bucky insists. “Most of the time I just—let you believe it. Played along with what you thought. You’re gonna tell me it’s just—fine?”

Now it’s Steve who drops his eyes, frowning. “There’s a difference,” he murmurs. “You didn’t want to.”

“But I did it.” There’s nothing on Steve’s face, no hint that he hears. “I lied to you,” Bucky repeats. “That doesn’t matter to you?”

Steve gives him a look that could be a glare. “What,” he says, “do you want me to hate you?” He sets his jaw like he’s squaring up to take a punch. “I forgive you.” As if the words themselves are weapons.

“You—” Bucky chokes on the words, scoffs, and hides his face in his hands. “Christ,” he mumbles into his palms.

“Bucky.” The sound of shifting cloth, and then the mattress dips next to Bucky. “You forgave me, didn’t you?” Steve asks, his voice so close, so kind, that Bucky has to bite down on the inside of his cheek. He bumps his shoulder against Bucky’s, and smiles when Bucky drops his hands to look over at him. “How could I do anything else?”

———

Bucky wakes to an empty bed and the clock blinking 00:17. The room is quiet, the bar fridge in a lull in its cycle; he can hear the TV in the next room. Steve’s not here, he sees with a pang of alarm, and pulls on his shoes with a clumsy urgency—and then he steps outside and sees Steve sitting on the hood of the car, facing the empty lot and the far-off highway.

He looks around when Bucky approaches. “Can’t sleep?”

Bucky sits on the hood beside him. “I was sleeping fine,” he says, suppressing a yawn through the words, though the grogginess is dissipating in the cool night air. “Best I’ve slept in—a while, actually,” he adds. “But I saw you were gone, so—”

“I’m not running,” Steve says. There’s no edge to his voice, and his face, when Bucky looks at him, is clear, soft in the red-and-blue lights of the vacancy sign above them.

All the same, the guilt crawls up out of wherever it had gone while Bucky slept, and he bites down on his lip. “I didn’t think that,” he says, wanting to reach for him, but— “I never thought you would,” he tries, but it’s a lie, and he knows Steve catches it. “I trust you,” he finishes, feeling as if it’s not enough. Not after everything he’s done to the contrary.

Steve’s got his eyes fixed on the highway still, following the headlights as they flash. After a moment, he says, “I meant what I said before. That I understand.” The edge of a wry smile flickers over his mouth, and he ducks his head. “Like I said, I know you.” He turns to meet Bucky’s eyes, that smile still playing faintly on his lips. “I trust you, too.”

“Even now?” Bucky asks, unable to help himself. 

“If you can trust me when I tried to kill you,” Steve says, “I can trust you when you were afraid of me.” He shrugs and looks away again. “Anyway, I have to wonder who I’d be—if I didn’t trust you. It’s in all my memories, as far back as they go.”

Something in the way he says it—the spark of hope, flickering to life in Bucky’s chest. “How far back is that,” he asks, “now?”

“I’m still not sure,” Steve says. “There’s this moment—on the pier, I think. At dusk.” He’s not smiling now, but his voice is so soft, half-lost in the noises of the night. “Summer, like this. But I was cold, and you gave me your jacket and—and put your arm around me.”

Bucky shivers, an echo of the imagined chill. He doesn’t remember it, not exactly—there were a hundred nights like that one, he thinks—but he can recall the risk of it, the breathless longing and the look of Steve in the reflection of the city’s lights off the water. He had been glad to be close, even for just a moment’s press of their shoulders. “It must have been,” he says, and clears his throat, “before the war. If we were hanging around on the pier.”

“You did that a lot,” Steve says.

“What,” Bucky says, “the pier?” He laughs, pushing down the old, phantom fear— “Yeah, well, I worked there—”

“No,” Steve says, “I mean—giving me your jacket. Taking care of me.”

Bucky looks away. “Well,” he says again. His face is warm, and he thinks it doesn’t feel much different at ninety-seven than at twenty-five, having Steve so close to him: even after everything, it leaves him speechless. And even after everything, he can’t quite say it. “You were sick a lot,” he manages. “You needed some looking after.”

“Oh,” Steve says, “is that all?”

Though he opens his mouth, Bucky finds he has no reply. The moment passes quietly between them, the crickets chirping out in the darkness and the light buzzing electric above. He can sense Steve next to him, the tug that’s always been there, like a lodestone: a temptation to sway close. And in the end the silence is its own answer.

“I wasn’t sure,” Steve says at length. “The memories didn’t match—you seem different now. But then I realized that the feeling was the same.” He breathes out slowly, not really a sigh, the noise mingling with the night. “And I thought—you must love me a lot, to let me come back to you now.”

Bucky looks at him, his heart pounding in his ears. Steve is looking back, his eyes shining, and Bucky doesn’t think he’s ever looked quite so—young. He swallows hard. “It was never a question of letting you,” he says. “I’ve—I’ve loved you since I can remember. When you found me again it was—” He stops, stumbling on the words he didn’t quite mean to say, so true that he can feel himself being scraped hollow. Something inside of him unearthed, exposed, tender like new skin and yet it’s a relief, at last. “I missed you,” he says. “I think I was sleepwalking ever since you left.”

Steve smiles, his eyes crinkling with it. “I know.” His voice is barely over a whisper, and he lifts his hand—places it, warm against the chill night, on Bucky’s cheek, holds him gently. His other hand finds Bucky’s where it’s planted on the hood of the car and twines their fingers together. “I know you loved me,” he says, “because you woke me up, too—”

“No,” Bucky says, “I let you fall.” There’s nowhere he can look that isn’t Steve; he can barely move as Steve closes the distance between them. And then Steve kisses him and Bucky surrenders to it: the darkness pulling them together, the neon light flashing through his closed eyelids, and Steve so warm against him that it feels like a dream. Like air after drowning, like the tide coming in—Steve tilts his head and Bucky follows, his fingers in Steve’s hair, Steve making a soft noise that might be a word—

And then Bucky pulls away, the moment so sweet and keen that it hurts. Steve looks at him: breathless, uncertain. “It’s not,” Bucky says, “you shouldn’t—I don’t want,” he tries again, “if you’re doing this because you think it’s what I want—then you don’t need to.” He falters, fear an ache in his chest. Fear that he will hurt Steve by saying this, fear that not saying it will be worse.

But Steve leans in again and presses his forehead to Bucky’s. His face is abstract in the shadow with the barest outline from the glowing sign above them, but though Steve’s whispering, Bucky hears him clearly. “Buck,” he says, “I love you. And I can’t find the beginning, I don’t know how far back it goes.” He takes a breath, the air trembling in the space between them. “But I know they didn’t put that in me.”

“Oh,” Bucky says, more of a sigh than a word. He lifts his hand to rest against the back of Steve’s neck, marveling at the closeness of him. He’s waited for this, he thinks, wanted it for so long—and now that it’s here he finds that it’s easy, like breathing, to say, “I love you, too.” To kiss Steve again, as softly as he knows how, as if the moment might shatter like glass—and to hold him tighter, and trust that, for tonight, it won’t.


	4. Chapter 4

Sunlight streams through cracks in the blinds, casting thin beams over the room. Bucky turns his head and sees Steve’s eyes open, focused on nothing: watching the dust motes swirl. An endless moment passes, watching him, the play of the light across his face, something in his eyes that Bucky had forgotten.

Then he shifts and settles closer. “It’s late,” he murmurs, his voice rough with sleep. “Sun’s been up for a while.”

“It’s summer,” Bucky replies. “That doesn’t mean anything.” In the seconds it takes him to think about it, though, he knows that Steve’s right, that the morning is wearing on toward noon if the noises from the hall outside are anything to judge by. A vacuum cleaner running, someone’s suitcase bumping over uneven carpet. And then he takes the next logical step: Sam and Natasha should be back by now. A thread of worry winds around his spine.

But Steve sighs, the quiet noise audible only because Bucky is so near. “You can relax, you know.”

Bucky smiles in spite of himself, sitting up. “I think we’ve relaxed plenty. We didn’t even keep watch.”

“Speak for yourself.” Steve sits up as well, but doesn’t follow suit when Bucky gets out of the bed. “I didn’t sleep. It didn’t ring at all,” he adds.

His hand stretched out toward the phone on the table, Bucky pauses, then picks it up anyway. It’s true, there are no missed calls, no texts either, but he frowns at it a moment before turning back to Steve. “You could’ve woken me up if you wanted to sleep.”

Steve shrugs. “I didn’t mind.”

There’s something tense under the words, belying the casual gesture. Bucky puts the phone down. “Lots to think about?” he guesses, unease drawing tight in his stomach.

Steve gives a small nod, his gaze thoughtful. “You seemed,” he starts, and then shakes his head. “I know we were never—we didn’t do that, before, but—it felt familiar. To be close to you. _You_ seemed familiar.”

For several seconds, Bucky is speechless. He takes a step toward Steve, hesitates, then sits on the edge of the bed. “Well, we’ve been sharing hotel rooms for a couple weeks now,” he points out, as if it’s the same thing at all. “We shared an apartment before the war.”

The corner of Steve’s mouth twitches, but his expression is serious. “That’s true,” he says. “I didn’t mean—you just seemed different. Not the same as you have been.” Steve must see the bewilderment on Bucky’s face, because he reaches out to take his hand and gives it a squeeze. “I still knew you, though. Better than before, even.”

Bucky hesitates, his mouth half-open. It isn’t only that he doesn’t know what to say—what to do with this incomprehensible information, how to understand it in relation to himself—it’s also that Steve is looking at him with the same soft, impossible expression he wore last night, and it puts a physical ache in Bucky’s chest, like going too long without air. “I’d say that was pretty clear,” he says. “Either that or you’re a damn good guesser.”

Steve blinks at him, then laughs—bright, instinctive laughter that Bucky knows he hasn’t heard in this century. He pulls Bucky in by the hand he’s still holding and kisses him, long and slow, a sliver of sunlight burning golden through Bucky’s eyelids.

———

Bucky flips through the channels on the TV, hoping for news of the search for Amanda Bailey, but there’s only the same photograph as before, the same interview with her mother. He checks the phone again on reflex, fighting the useless tension in the pit of his stomach. It’s been just about twenty-four hours, he guesses, since they left Sam and Natasha at the base, and though they’ve tried not to use their phones at all in case of tracking, he can’t help but picture the worst: another shootout, or some type of explosive. He wonders if that would show up on the news.

Sick of his own wondering, he turns off the TV and tosses the remote aside. Steve is sitting on the edge of the bed, cleaning his gun; Bucky watches him at it for a moment.

Without looking up, Steve says, “Weren’t you just telling me yesterday that we have to be patient?”

Bucky scowls. “That was yesterday.”

“You were right, though,” Steve says. “They’ll call, or they’ll show up.” He sounds certain, utterly unconcerned with the other possibilities, and yet Bucky thinks he recognizes his own anxiety in the focused way Steve’s watching his hands. Just as he thinks it, Steve glances up briefly, the hint of a smile on his lips. “What did you do in London?” he asks. Into Bucky’s confused silence, he elaborates: “You said you went to London on leave. What did you do then, while you were waiting?”

“We were both in London,” Bucky says; it’s clear that Steve doesn’t remember. He frowns, thinking back. He can recall the taste of whiskey, the burn in his throat, the scent of the cigarette smoke clouding the air. “We went dancing a couple times. Played cards. Talked to the locals.”

“Anything we could do now?” Steve asks, setting the gun aside and picking up another from the bed next to him. “Help us pass the time?”

Bucky frowns. He recognizes the gun in Steve’s hands as his own, sees that the other extra pistols are also laid out on top of the covers. “I don’t know,” he admits. “Want to shoot bottles in the parking lot?”

“I don’t need the practice,” Steve tells him, completely deadpan, but Bucky’s sure it’s meant as a joke. Then he says, “And I—I don’t want—” and falls silent, looking suddenly frustrated. He pauses halfway through disassembling the gun in his hands.

“What?” Bucky prompts. He feels a jolt of fear, seeing the uncertainty in Steve’s expression: it’s not the blank mask he’s worn so often, but it’s only one step removed, too close for comfort.

Another moment of hesitation, and then Steve’s hands start moving again. There’s a ruthless efficiency to the motions, so quick they seem almost entirely unconscious. “I want to be prepared,” he says, more quietly than before. “I want to clean this gun and keep it ready. But I don’t want to use it.” He shakes his head. “Not right now.”

He doesn’t look up, doesn’t change the way he’s sitting or pause what he’s doing, but Bucky can feel it: Steve’s holding his breath, waiting—flinching. It’s horrifying, the way he seems to curl in on himself even without moving. “It’s okay,” Bucky says, and he gets up, comes to sit next to Steve on the bed. He picks up one of the other guns and starts taking it apart. As he works, he glances over at Steve, tries for a smile, hoping to lift the darkness of the last thirty seconds, to go back to the ease they’d had between them. “It’s okay,” he repeats, and Steve meets his gaze, looking faintly shocked. “So we’ll clean the guns. We don’t have to shoot ‘em.”

Steve nods, a choppy, dubious movement, and keeps working on his gun. He finishes cleaning it and slides the magazine back in with a snap; reaches for the next. Bucky holds himself back from constantly looking at him, but he can feel the slow relaxation, the loosening of his limbs from the stiffness and fear. It softens all the air in the room.

It’s strange, Bucky thinks as they work their way through the pile of weapons: strange, that he can have this. That he can comfort Steve when he himself feels like a lit fuse at the best of times. He opens his mouth, not sure if it’s something he can say aloud.

Before he can speak at all, Steve says, “I remember dancing. But not in London, I don’t think.”

As always, Bucky’s heart skips a beat in surprise, but for once it isn’t so painful. He marvels at that as he says, “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.” Steve’s voice is thoughtful; there’s still an edge of something sharp, an aftershock of fear, but his hands are as steady as ever. “I don’t know where, exactly. Before the war, it must’ve been, and I was dancing with you—it was just us. Someone was playing a record—a woman. She was laughing.” He chuckles, a surprised huff of breath. “Laughing at us.”

Absurdly, Bucky feels himself blushing. “That was your ma,” he tells Steve. “Jesus Christ, I can’t believe you remember that.”

“My mother?” Steve asks, as if he’s never heard the word. There’s only one gun left to strip and clean, but neither of them picks it up—Steve is looking at Bucky with an expression somewhere between apprehension and hunger, as if he isn’t sure he wants to know. “What were we—?”

“We were just kids,” Bucky says, “still in school. And you didn’t know how to dance, so I said I’d teach you.” He snorts. “You stepped on my feet and called me names to cover it up. You knew it’d make your ma laugh.” All at once, the motel room seems to have shrunk until it resembles that tiny apartment—the tabletop over the bathtub, the lamplight soft on the walls. Sarah Rogers leaning on the door frame and rolling her eyes.

Steve lets out a long breath, his distant gaze passing slowly over the sunlit room as if he can see the other scene, too. “I loved you then, you know,” he says, a smile at the corner of his mouth.

Bucky nods, feeling himself smile in response without even meaning too. “I know,” he says, and it’s as much of a miracle as it was last night, as it has been every second that’s passed since. “I loved you, too.” The more things change, he thinks—and isn’t it funny that he hasn’t danced in years, but he can still remember the way Steve’s hands felt in his; he reaches out and holds them now, and it feels the same.

———

He’s on an assignment in the snow, rooting among ice and jagged boulders for—and he’s wearing his army fatigues and he’s freezing, and night is falling fast but he has to keep looking for—and someone is standing behind him but he can’t turn yet, he hasn’t found—

His hands brush against something in the snow, his fingers so cold they won’t bend right, and he can’t pull the thing out—it’s heavy in his arms, dragging him down into the powdery snow—the thing he’s touching slips away, he’s in snow up to his neck and it isn’t snow, it’s dirt—filling his mouth, choking him as he tries in vain to find—

“Bucky.” The voice comes from far away. “Bucky, wake up!”

The instant Bucky opens his eyes, he knows where he is, but there’s a terrible moment where he still can’t breathe, his throat squeezing tight as he gasps. Then the pressure eases and he gulps in mouthfuls of air, his lungs aching as fiercely as they did when the Valkyrie dove into the sea. He chokes, sputters; reaches out and finds Steve with trembling hands.

Steve pulls him closer, holds him without crushing him. “It was a dream,” he says as Bucky shudders, “just a dream.” His voice is low to match the darkness.

Bucky clutches at Steve’s shirt, feeling the warmth of his body through the thin fabric—presses himself closer, a phantom numbness still lingering in his fingers. “I was in the Alps,” he mumbles into Steve’s shoulder. “In the ravine, where you fell.”

Gently, Steve’s hand comes up to cup the back of Bucky’s head. “On the train?” he asks.

“No. Down in the snow.” The dream is already fading, leaving behind only the tingle of adrenaline and a strange sense of isolation. “I was alone.” He swallows hard.

Steve’s fingers are in his hair, their bodies pressed so close together that Bucky can feel his own heart beating against Steve’s chest. Steve takes a breath and Bucky feels that, too, and the muted vibrations as he says, “You’re not alone. I’m right here with you.”

Bucky knows it—he knows it. He can only just make himself believe it. He disentangles himself from Steve slightly and lies down again, blinking in the darkness until he can make out Steve lying with his head on the same pillow: a strip of bluish moonlight illuminates half his face, the same gap in the curtains that let in the sunlight in the morning.

Steve blinks back at him and reaches out to put his hand against Bucky’s cheek. “Do you have nightmares a lot?” he whispers.

“No,” Bucky replies. Usually he doesn’t dream at all—a blessing, given everything. “Do you?”

“Every night,” Steve says, his thumb moving slowly over Bucky’s cheekbone.

He doesn’t sound upset or sad, he just says it, frank and simple. “I didn’t know,” Bucky tells him, meaning it as an apology—they’ve been sleeping in the same bed for weeks now; how has this escaped him? The dread of his own dream ebbs somewhat as he realizes that Steve has never even hinted at it, maybe would never have mentioned it at all if Bucky hadn’t asked.

But Steve doesn’t seem bothered by it. He doesn’t stop his soft caress of Bucky’s face, doesn’t look away. “They trained me not to show it,” he says. “It’s not your fault.”

“You can tell me, though,” Bucky whispers. “If you want. You could wake me up, next time.”

Steve folds his hand so his knuckles are against Bucky’s skin, his thumb brushing over Bucky’s lips. “You’d never get any sleep at all.”

There’s an unbearable softness in his voice, in his eyes. Against Steve’s thumb, Bucky says, “Come here.” He pulls Steve to him, tugs him around so that Bucky can cradle him against his own body, his front pressed to Steve’s back; he twines their feet together and Steve lets him. “You remember sleeping like this?” he asks, and feels Steve shake his head minutely. “We shared a foxhole a couple times,” Bucky explains. “In France.” He’d been so exhausted and yet, mundanely, the prospect of laying himself down so close to Steve had still felt like a dream—how badly he’d wanted it, and how much it had terrified him.

He tightens his hold on Steve now, pressing his lips against Steve’s shoulder: because he can, because it feels good. Steve nestles into his embrace as if he were small again.

———

The sun isn’t up yet, the only hint of the coming day an aura of cobalt blue away to the east, and the pavement is cold. Bucky leans against the brick wall of the motel and watches that strip of sky widen from moment to moment. Steve, at his side, passes the cup of coffee back to him. They’ll have to go back inside before long, both of them overly wary of being tracked here from the base, but it’s enough to just spend a minute or two in the fresh air.

“There was a mission,” Steve says, abruptly but quietly, his voice so soft that it blends with the rustling of the wind in the grass— “in a little house in the hills in—the countryside. Somewhere.” Bucky looks over at him, startled, and Steve glances up through his lashes as if he’s afraid to be caught looking. When their eyes meet, he gives a little half-shake of his head. “I don’t remember the target,” he says. “But when it was—over, I remember sitting around, waiting for them to come collect me. There were no lights, no one around for miles, and it felt—quiet. Peaceful.”

“I didn’t—” His voice comes out in a rasp. Bucky isn’t sure where Steve’s going with this or if he’s even expected to respond, but he clears his throat and tries again. “I didn’t know it was like that for you.”

“It wasn’t,” Steve says, “most of the time.” His eyes are lowered, trained on the cup in his hand. “If they’d known I—they wouldn’t have let me keep that memory, if they’d known.”

He pauses, and the pause goes on: Bucky would think he was done talking, if not for the restless way his eyes roam across the shadowy lot before them. “The chair?” Bucky asks.

Steve nods. He’s watching the highway now, as he did the night before, the headlights passing back and forth out beyond the expanse of darkness. “They would’ve burned it out of me. But I held onto it, somehow—I think because I wanted it so badly. I’d think of it,” he says, “whenever they put me in the ice.”

He sounds calm, almost half-asleep, but Bucky can’t help feeling horrified. He doesn’t know where to begin, how to say it: that he’s sorry, that he’d change it if he could. He shifts against the wall, leaning over so that their arms are pressed together, a solid line of warmth between their bodies. “I’m glad you had that,” he says. “Something to hold on to.”

At his touch, Steve turns to him, almost smiling but not quite—something warm in his gaze, at least. “I thought about it after D.C., too,” he says. “I didn’t know where I was going or what I should do, I was—so lost, without a mission, and I thought”—he shakes his head with a strange little chuckle—“I thought maybe I’d find that place and it would help. I didn’t know where it was, or I think I would’ve gone. But they never gave me coordinates.” He shrugs. “They never sent me far enough afield to need them.”

“God, Stevie,” Bucky says; it’s all he can think to say, and his voice breaks on the word.

“It’s okay, Buck.” Steve reaches down between them and takes Bucky’s hand in his free one, threads their fingers together, lifts their hands and ducks his head slightly to kiss Bucky’s knuckles. “I’m not trying to get there anymore,” he says, his breath ghosting over Bucky’s skin. “I found you instead.”

———

The day slips languidly by, both of them alternating between checking the phone and watching the shadows crawl along the opposite wall. They’re restless and trying not to be: with no objective, nothing to do but wait, it becomes clear just how long Sam and Natasha have been gone. Neither of them suggests driving out in search of them, but Bucky can tell they’re both thinking of it; he figures it’ll be unavoidable if the other two don’t come back by evening.

Bucky flips through the channels again without any luck. He winds up watching the same bulletin as the day before, the interview and the photograph. Steve, sitting on the floor with his back against Bucky’s knees, goes still, watching the number for the missing persons hotline scroll across the screen. Bucky wonders if Steve is as frightened, thinking about Amanda, as Bucky himself is: wondering where she is, what they’re doing to her, if they’re already too late. Even as he thinks it, Steve reaches up and back without looking, finds Bucky’s hand where it rests on his knee and holds it.

There’s a noise from the parking lot, the crunch of gravel under tires; both of them startle, hopeful. Steve gets to his feet and goes to the window, peering through the blinds. “Are they back?” Bucky asks, turning off the TV.

Steve doesn’t answer immediately. After a moment or two, Bucky looks over to see him crouched behind the table that stands next to the door. Meeting his gaze, Steve jerks his head at the window, blocked by the blinds but with shadowy movement beyond it. Steve hisses something unintelligible and makes a sharp motion, the meaning clear: _get down._

Bucky does as he’s told, confused into obedience, dropping down on the other side of the bed. He can’t see Steve from here, but he can see the doorknob rattling in its plate and then, slowly, turning. In the heartbeat before the door opens, the alarm catches up with Bucky, hot and sick in his gut. Three figures enter; though they’re in shadow, with the late afternoon sun in full force behind them, it’s clear that they each have pistols drawn.

The sight of the guns, like a wave of icy water splashing over him, turns Bucky’s alarm into full-fledged fear, but he stays where he is. He hopes to God Steve’s hidden himself somehow, though there wasn’t really any place for him to go—but he must have managed it, because the agents move silently into the room and past the table with no commotion. Caught between the bed and the far wall, Bucky knows there’s no such option for him. He’s not even armed, his gun sitting uselessly on the bedside table, far closer to Steve than himself; he hadn’t thought to keep it on hand—there had been no need, just the two of them.

Bucky pulls his careering thoughts back in line: the forwardmost agent is almost on top of him. Another step and it’ll be too late. Bucky jumps up before she has a chance to spot him and, gritting his teeth, his face screwed up in effort, swings his fist toward her face. He feels his knuckles connect with her skin, and she goes reeling.

He moves past her as she goes down, knowing by the sudden burst of sound that Steve must also have made his move. Before he can interpret the scene before him, though, Bucky winds up face-to-face with the second agent’s gun, and she shoots, but Bucky’s ready and ducks. He hears the crunch of splintering wood behind him, unnaturally loud in his ears, as he grabs her around the waist, toppling her to the floor. She’s faster than the agent in the base, though, and slips out of his grip as soon as they hit the ground. Bucky struggles to get up after her, knowing Steve will have his attention on the other one, desperate to stop her from getting to—

As Bucky makes it to his knees, he sees the agent stagger from a blow to the side of her head. Bucky blinks, his thoughts moving strangely slowly despite how everything seems sped-up around him, and sees Steve, his face a cold mask, the third agent crumpled on the floor behind him.

Steve swings again, and Bucky turns back to the first agent in time to be hit in the gut. He wasn’t ready, wasn’t thinking: he doubles over, groaning, and receives a knee to the face. Spitting blood, he blocks the next blow and grabs the agent by the arm, twisting her around—she wrenches her weight around and Bucky can feel his heartbeat in the palms of his hands as he tries to pin her and can’t quite—and the gun in her hand goes off between them.

It’s a shock, both the noise and the recoil, and as the two of them fall together, Bucky lets her momentum drag them down and slams her head into the corner of the TV cabinet. He grabs the gun and scrabbles up, turning around to see Steve going hand-to-hand with the last agent. With a frantic animal noise that scrapes his throat raw, Bucky hauls her away from Steve by the back of her collar. With her pressed back against him, he meets Steve’s gaze, sees an expression in his eyes that might be shock. Bucky brings the gun up and shoots the agent under the chin once—twice—and lets her fall away.

He stays standing by some miracle, looking wildly around, his pulse hammering in his ears, a rough, violent sound grating in the sudden calm until he realizes it’s him, gasping for air. He takes one staggering step toward Steve, who reaches out and clutches at him, his blank expression entirely gone now, replaced by alarm. “Are you okay?” Bucky chokes out, suddenly sure he must be hurt.

Steve’s fingers are digging into his arms, the metal hand so tight it’s painful. “She shot you,” he says.

Bucky looks down to see a ragged hole in his pants leg. “Shit,” he says, hardly hearing himself. The pain hasn’t hit yet, but it will. Looking away, he counts the agents, one, two, three, none of them moving, but it doesn’t get easier to breathe: his eyes catch on a pair of glazed eyes, a blanket dragged halfway to the floor, the spatter of blood on the ceiling. He looks back to Steve, who’s still holding onto him. “Are—are you—?”

“Not a scratch,” Steve says, with a dry little chuckle. “Buck. Hey.” There’s concern in his voice and an uncertainty that seems at odds with the way he’d fought, so righteous and furious, like no time had passed since that battle on the causeway.

Bucky swallows hard. “I’ll live,” he says, clawing his way back to reason. He twists to look behind him at the 9-millimeter hole in the plaster next to the door: the truly lucky thing, he thinks, is how quiet the whole fight was. Over in three minutes, and barely a sound out of anyone—someone will have heard the gunshots, but without any other noises they might be able to pass it off as television, the car backfiring, who knows—Bucky blinks to clear a sudden wave of dizziness and catches himself against Steve, his other hand braced on the bloody edge of the TV cabinet.

“Hey,” Steve says again, moving to support more of Bucky’s weight, so close that Bucky can feel his steady breathing. It’s that, more than anything else, that brings Bucky back to himself, along with the way Steve shakes his arm, gently but firmly, demanding his attention. “You should sit down,” he urges.

Bucky nods and steps over the body of the agent who shot him, and then he feels it, like fire lancing all along the limb. He stumbles his way back to the bed and falls onto it. The motion is so jarring that he hisses in pain. His hand clenches around Steve’s, who squeezes back.

Then Steve lets go. “I’ll get the kit,” he says, and turns, steps over the agent, and vanishes into the bathroom.

Alone, Bucky has a split second to scrub a hand over his face before he hears the click of the lock again—the handle turning. He’s on his feet before he can think, his heart hammering as if it had never stopped, lunging for the gun where he’d dropped it on the floor. His leg burns—he raises the gun—Steve’s behind him, trying to shove him out of the way—

“Jesus,” Sam says, cringing away from the gun and lowering his own pistol as well. Natasha, behind him, raises her knife reflexively, then stops herself with a visible effort. Bucky sags against Steve’s arm, the relief dizzying, and drops the gun again. Sam ushers Natasha inside and they stand there a moment, blinking around the darkened room. “They got here first, huh?” he says.

Bucky blinks rapidly, clearing his eyes; at his side, Steve says, “They?”

“Those assholes from the base,” Natasha says, sliding her knife back into its holster. She nudges the nearest body with her toe. “We figured they were coming for you when they turned around and started heading back here, but—we couldn’t catch up in time.” She runs a hand through her hair and shakes her head, her whole body seeming to sag somewhat, with exhaustion or defeat, Bucky can’t tell. One side of her mouth pulls up in a bitter smile. “It looked like we’d beat them here when we found their van, but I guess not.”

Bucky eases himself back onto the bed, watching Sam rest a hand briefly on Natasha’s shoulder. “Amanda?” he asks.

Sam shakes his head. “She wasn’t with them.”

For a moment, there’s only silence. Bucky looks, without really seeing, at the congealing blood on the floor, the grain of the carpet visible in the mess. “God,” he says, his voice thin to his own ears. Then something nudges his arm: the handle of a knife, Steve holding it out to him hilt-first as he crouches next to him.

Bucky stares at it a moment. It’s one of the same ones, he realizes, that Steve had on him when they first found him in Mississippi. He takes it, gripping the handle tight enough to hurt, wishing it would ground him more than it does. He can sense more than see Steve watching him as he cuts away the fabric of his pants, making a bigger hole around the wound; he can feel the worry emanating from him like heat waves.

But there’s no chance to thank him for the knife or to reassure him: Natasha sucks in a shocked breath. “Shit,” she says, “they got you?”

“I’m fine,” Bucky replies, looking up at her wide eyes. In a surreal way, it’s flattering that she sounds so surprised. “The bullet went all the way through.” He glances to Sam, who looks equally concerned. “It’s fine,” he insists, fighting a painful exhaustion that throbs in time with his leg. He turns back to Steve, who’s coming out of the bathroom again, this time with a piece of damp gauze. “Thanks.”

Steve gives him a small smile. “What happened out there?” he asks as Bucky starts cleaning the wound, setting his jaw against the sting where the cloth touches raw flesh. “Were you chasing them that whole time?”

Thankfully, Sam looks away to answer. “Pretty much,” he says, and nods toward Natasha. “We crossed into Wisconsin, and Nat had the idea to cut them off just past Reedsburg—we took out one of the agents, but we wrecked the van we were driving. It took us a while to find another car and catch up again.”

Bucky pauses in the middle of stretching the bandage over another square of gauze, fighting a sudden spike of renewed anxiety. “How many of them were there?”

“Only four, I think,” Natasha tells him, “from what we could see.” She shakes her head, clearly guessing what he’s thinking. “I don’t think there are any more coming here. Not today, at least.”

The worry recedes somewhat. Bucky switches hands and places more gauze over the exit wound, wincing at the pressure. “Okay,” he says. “Okay, so—you said they ditched their van?”

As he asks the question, his voice as steady as he can make it, Steve kneels at his side again. He covers Bucky’s hand with his own, holding the gauze in place, and takes the end of the bandage as well. His hands are steady as he takes over: wrapping the wound again, and then once more, firm but careful in every movement. As if he knows how hard Bucky has to fight to keep his own hands from shaking. He keeps his eyes down, but there’s a softness in his face that Bucky clings to like a candle in the dark.

“Not too far outside of town,” Natasha says, her eyes on Sam, who nods. “We found some ashes where they left it. So we were on the right track, sort of—they had something there that they didn’t want us to get.”

“But not the kid,” Bucky says. He grits his teeth, fighting the feeling of heaviness in his chest. With his hands empty, he can’t see anything but the blood on them. “She could be anywhere now.”

Gently, Steve ties off the bandage. He rests one wrist across Bucky’s knee, his fingers smeared with red; with his other hand, he reaches out and takes Bucky’s from where it sits limply on top of the coverlet. “We should’ve kept one of them alive,” he says, and Bucky sees his gaze fixed on the third agent, the one Bucky shot in the head. “For questioning.”

Bucky stares at him, numb, deadened, the shock seeping into his bones now. That’s true, he thinks, they should have. And yet in the moment all he’d thought about was protecting Steve, surviving the sudden implosion of the peace that had existed between them. “I—” He doesn’t know what he’s going to say, but Steve looks back to him anyway. His other hand comes to cover Bucky’s as well, grounding him.

“It’s okay,” Natasha says, her voice unexpectedly sympathetic. “We did find something. Not the kid, but maybe—hopefully—where they’re keeping her.”

It takes a moment for the words to penetrate. Steve, quicker to understand, gets to his feet. “What do you mean?” he asks, suddenly urgent.

Bucky looks around, too, and sees Sam’s gaze snap from his hand, still held fast in Steve’s, up to his face. There’s an expression on his face that Bucky can’t quite parse, his eyes hot as a branding iron, but there’s no time to wonder about it: he looks away immediately, saying, “We don’t have whatever documents they burned, so we don’t know who’s behind this. But we got coordinates out of their van. Somewhere in Montana, just north of the Idaho border. That’s where they were headed before we forced them to change plans.”

Steve’s hand tightens around Bucky’s, his relief palpable, but Bucky’s mind is still reeling. “You mean,” he says, dragging the words out, “you mean you found a lead?”

It’s Natasha who answers. “Something like that,” she says. “Not sure what we’ll find there, but—”

“But we can’t stick around here,” Bucky finishes, his gaze landing once more on the bodies, the ruined carpet. He can feel the focus starting to return, the narrowed vision, the sense of purpose: the road ahead. “It’s not much to go on,” he says to the room at large. No one answers, and he knows what they’re thinking: it’s better than nothing, which is what they have otherwise.

“It’s two days to Montana,” Sam says. His voice is firm, businesslike: he stands in the middle of the room as if it isn’t shot to hell, as if he hasn’t just spent the better part of the last 48 hours driving. “Think we can start tonight?” he asks, looking first to Bucky, then to Steve.

Steve, whose eyes are on Bucky. Who is looking at him like the room around them doesn’t exist at all, like he would wait here forever if Bucky asked it of him. But he wouldn’t, Bucky knows, and they can’t; they have a mission. “I don’t think we have a choice,” he says, levering himself to his feet with the help of Steve’s hand on his elbow. He ignores the complaint from his leg and looks back to Sam, who nods. “As soon as it’s dark, we’ve gotta go.”

———

Steve and Natasha both fall asleep somewhere past the sign for Blue Earth, and Bucky turns the radio to some late-night talk show, the babble filling the front seat—soft enough not to wake them, but just loud enough that he can tune out his own thoughts.

At least until Sam shifts in the passenger seat—not asleep after all—and asks, “How’s the leg?”

Bucky shrugs. “Itches a bit,” he admits. “But it’s scabbing over.”

Sam nods. “Why didn’t you let Steve drive?” he asks, sounding more concerned than accusatory. “Out of the four of us, he’s the only one who’s fully functional.”

“I am fully functional,” Bucky replies. “Anyway—I wouldn’t have been able to sleep.” He can’t help thinking, then, of Steve saying he has bad dreams every night—he looks into the rearview mirror, but Steve seems sound asleep, his head lolling back against the headrest. If he’s stuck in a nightmare, there’s no outward sign. But again, Bucky thinks, that doesn’t seem to be unusual.

Out of the corner of his eye, he realizes Sam is watching him. Bucky fixes his gaze back on the road. “What?”

There’s a moment of hesitation, and then— “You and Steve, huh?” Sam asks, quiet.

Bucky sets his jaw. “What’s with the twenty questions?” he demands.

Sam leans forward slightly over the console, pitching his voice low enough that it won’t carry to the back seat. “Barnes. Are you sure you’ve thought this through?”

Bucky glances over at him and sees the same look on his face as in the motel room, a troubled, warning expression. “What are you talking about?”

“We’re trying to do a job here,” Sam says. “We can’t let anything get in the way of that.”

“What are you—?” Bucky scoffs, keeping quiet only with difficulty. “It’s not going to _get in the way,_ what—?”

“Isn’t it?” Sam interrupts. “Two weeks ago we thought he might kill us. Listen,” he adds when Bucky draws an angry breath, “I know that’s not the issue now, but he’s still not—the guy you knew in the forties. He’s been a captive for over fifty years, he hasn’t been able to trust his own mind. He thought you were his handler—I mean, please tell me you dealt with that at least—”

“God,” Bucky says, nearly swerving the car into the next lane in his horror, “yes. What the hell?”

“Okay,” Sam continues, dogged, “okay, good, but—still, Barnes, he barely knows which way’s up—”

“He knows,” Bucky says. Sam sighs; Bucky doesn’t look, but he can imagine him rubbing his temples, that drawn and worried look on his face that Bucky’s grown to know so well. “He knows,” Bucky insists. “He’s—he’s remembering things. He’s remembering me.”

There’s another pause, doubtful. “And you?” Sam asks then. “What about you?”

Bucky scowls through the windshield. “What about me?”

“This isn’t like the other cells we’ve tracked.” Sam’s voice is quieter now, though still firm: Bucky can tell he’s trying to sound reasonable, rational, like Bucky’s one of the vets at his meetings. “It’s personal for you.”

“Come on, Wilson,” Bucky says, pained. “You think I don’t know that?” He feels somehow both irritated and guilty at once: without meaning to, he thinks about Amanda, her name scratched into the stone, trapped somewhere—thinks about himself, strapped to that table with Zola cutting into him, trying to burn him out of himself.

“I know you do,” Sam says, and there’s enough heaviness to his voice that Bucky knows they’re thinking of the same thing. “But it’s not—you can’t just ignore that. Or pretend like it’s not affecting the way you do your job. We are the only thing that girl’s got,” he continues. “The only ones who know where she is and can get her out.”

There’s a moment where Bucky wants to snap out an angry retort, but he can’t quite manage it. He remembers how it had felt when they’d realized HYDRA’s plan: remembers Natasha saying _no one ever trained me to save people._ The uncertainty and the fear, and the doubt that still lingers, wondering whether they’ll ever find her at all. “What’s your point?” he asks, hearing the bitter edge in his own words.

“I just want to make sure you know what you’re doing with—this.”

“With Steve, you mean.” Sam doesn’t contradict him. “Because I can’t be trusted to know it on my own?”

“No.” There’s a motion in Bucky’s peripheral vision: Sam rubbing a hand over his face. “Because I care about you, and—and this is hard for all of us, but especially you. Especially Steve.” He pauses as if he expects more argument, but Bucky doesn’t reply; he can’t. He doesn’t know what to say to the kindness in Sam’s voice. Cautiously, Sam says, “And I’m—I’m happy for you two, I am. I’m glad he’s coming back to himself, and I’m glad you guys can be together now. I mean, God, if anyone deserves it—” He takes a breath. “But I’ve seen this before. Barnes, I’ve been here before.”

Bucky looks over, startled, and sees Sam looking back, his head propped on his hand, partially leaning on the door. “With Riley?” he asks.

Sam looks away, out the darkened window. “I would’ve done anything,” he says, more quietly than before, “to help him, if I could have. I would’ve put myself in front of that rocket if I’d seen it coming. Afterward, I—I wished I had, I didn’t care what it would’ve meant, who else might’ve been hurt because I wasn’t there to protect them. Nothing else mattered.” There’s a halting cadence to the words that makes Bucky think he doesn’t tell this story at V.A. meetings. “So, yeah,” he says, “I know what it’s like—to get too close to something and forget the bigger picture. And none of us can afford to do that right now.”

The anger ebbs, though the guilt stays. Bucky shifts his grip on the steering wheel and says, “I hear you. But you don’t need to be worried.” He hesitates, trying to find the words: neither of them, he thinks, have talked like this in months, not since D.C., since Sam stood on that bridge and told him he couldn’t save Steve. He’d been wrong, thank God, but he’d meant it kindly, and the same is true now. “If I chose Steve over the mission,” Bucky says slowly, “over saving Amanda, it would be like letting him fall off that train again. I couldn’t live with myself.” He looks away from the road briefly and meets Sam’s eyes, sees him looking steadily back. “And he’d never forgive me.”

After a moment, Sam’s gaze slides away again. There’s a quirk to his mouth that seems skeptical but could mean nothing. “Glad to hear he’s got his head on straight, at least.”

Bucky bites down on the spark of anger. “He does,” he replies. “Even if you’re not sold on me, I hope you trust him to do the right thing—and I hope you trust me,” he adds as Sam takes a breath to speak, “to follow his lead. To do right by him, no matter what.”

———

**APPROX. LOCATION: KENNEBEC, SOUTH DAKOTA**

Steve’s got the map spread out across the trunk of the car, tracking their progress by the light of the sun as it crests the horizon, but he looks up when Bucky approaches. “We’re making good time,” he says.

Bucky comes to stand next to him, watching him draw his finger along the line of the road. “Think we’ll make it by tomorrow?”

“If we don’t stop too often, we could.”

Bucky leans into his side, turns his head slightly to rest his chin on the edge of Steve’s shoulder. He thinks about what it would mean, if they were to reach their destination tonight—with no lingering beyond this pit stop, he knows they could do it. And then: cracking the base, finding Amanda. Saving her, if they can. But before that, the long hours in the car, going as fast as they can and still not fast enough, danger lurking at every stoplight. It seems more of an ordeal than it ever has before, on this job or any of the others through the decades.

Steve turns his head, too, presses a soft kiss to Bucky’s forehead. “What is it?” he asks, pulling back slightly. “You look worried.”

No longer leaning on Steve, Bucky feels cold: he reaches out and takes his hand. “It’s just,” he says, and shakes his head. He doesn’t know how to say it. “The last few days,” he tries, the words coming haltingly, “with you, that was—nice.” He chuckles once at how inadequate the word is. “It was good to—to have time with you. Time when we could relax, feel safe.” He swallows. “It felt like something out of someone else’s life.”

“I know,” Steve says, a small smile on his lips. “I’ve never had that in the middle of a mission before. Usually between assignments was the only time I had any peace.” He toys with Bucky’s fingers, his touch light. “It’s always nice to have a break.”

Bucky closes his hand around Steve’s, stilling the gentle motion. “Yeah,” he says, and swallows again. He shakes his head. “But I can’t forget it, Stevie. I don’t want it to be just something in between missions.”

At the change in Bucky’s grip, Steve looks up; as he listens, his expression changes from thoughtful to confused—bewildered, even, as if Bucky has started speaking a different language. “What do you mean?” he asks.

“I—” Bucky hesitates, floundering again for the right words to explain himself. But there’s no talking around it, now, the desperate clawing urgency that had filled him during the attack at the motel and comes back in full force as Steve holds his hand. “I’m scared,” he says, “of losing you.” Like drawing poison from a wound, the truth spilling out of him. “I don’t want to—I want to do something else,” he says, “something that isn’t this—this—fighting, and running, and”—the icy wash of fear, he recalls, when the agents had found them, when they had shattered that perfect stillness—“and I want us to have that,” he says. His voice raw against the early-morning birdsong. “That peace. I want it for us.”

There’s a moment where neither of them speaks, the birds and the gentle wind swelling to fill the empty space. “We just had it,” Steve says, tilting his head to one side to follow Bucky’s gaze. “We can have it again, after this mission. I mean—” Another tiny smile flickers at the corner of his mouth, though his voice is serious. “We’ve stopped here, haven’t we?” He doesn’t let go of Bucky’s hand. “We can still have some peace.”

The words are so soft, it’s tempting to surrender to them—the same temptation, Bucky thinks, that he yielded to when he let Steve believe he was his handler; the temptation of doing the things he knows how to do. But he can’t do it now, not when it could cost him everything. “No,” he says, “I want more than that. Once we finish this, once we find Amanda and get her out, I want—something without a mission.” He can see in Steve’s eyes that he doesn’t understand, or that he does and doesn’t want to: some type of fear on his face, something as lost as when Bucky first found him. Bucky steps closer, wanting to comfort him but unable to keep himself from speaking. “I’ve been fighting for so long, Stevie,” he tells him, making his voice as soft as he can. “And I’m tired. Ever since I lost you that first time, I think I’ve—just been going through the motions, because the fight was all I had. But now I—now I have you. And”—his throat tight, the backs of his eyes prickling—“I don’t want to lose you again.”

“You won’t,” Steve says, and puts his hand on Bucky’s face, the movement rough and frantic. As if he wants to tell Bucky something as desperately as Bucky wants to tell him. His voice is twisted, pained. “You won’t, I’m right here.”

Bucky closes his eyes against Steve’s touch, just for a moment. When he opens them again, Steve is looking at him with that same agony. Something pulls tight in Bucky’s chest, painful enough to match it. “Don’t you want it to last?” he asks, almost in a whisper. “What we had there?”

Steve takes a breath and doesn’t breathe it out—caught, his eyes searching Bucky’s face, the same blue as the lightening sky. “I don’t know,” he says. Bucky can see the bob of his throat as he swallows. “I don’t know, Bucky, I—I’ve always had a mission. I don’t know, I want—I want you.” He speaks with a misery Bucky’s never heard before. “I love you,” he says, giving Bucky’s face a little shake as he says it. “But—I don’t know what it would mean, to stop.”

His voice shakes minutely. It’s that tremor that makes Bucky weak, makes him reach out and put his hand on Steve’s arm, just to hold him. He only wants to tell Steve the things that are burning a hole in him, to have him understand: not to hurt him. “Okay,” he says, “it’s okay.” He takes a deep breath; it steadies him, and he tightens his grip on Steve’s arm to steady him, too. “You know I’m with you. I won’t make you choose between me and the mission,” he tells him, and means it fiercely. Steve is still looking at him, beseeching, and Bucky thinks that if he could’ve fallen from that train instead, to spare Steve this, he would have. He would’ve let Zola burn him away to keep Steve from suffering. “I’m with you on this,” he says, “till the end of the line.”

———

**APPROX. LOCATION: SPRINGTIME, MONTANA**

All rest stops are the same, Bucky thinks: they’ve traveled a full day and crossed the Montana border, but looking around at the picnic tables and concrete bird bath, he feels like they could still be in Mississippi. Fewer truckers at this one, though, most barreling past on the highway without slowing, their headlights flashing in the dusk. Bucky knows that they shouldn’t really have stopped, either, but it’s just for a minute or two, a drink of water and a chance to stretch their legs.

There are only two other vehicles beside theirs, a dusty gray van and a sleek-looking hybrid that’s as out-of-place as their own car. Bucky watches its owners closely, barely even realizing he’s wary of them until he catches himself squinting to peer inside the trunk when one of the women reaches inside for something. It’s dark enough that he can’t see clearly: is she reaching for a weapon? She comes out with a mini cooler, though, and offers her companion a pop can. The other woman takes it with a smile.

Bucky feels mildly disgusted with himself—though the couple hasn’t even noticed him, thankfully—but then again, who could really blame him? Haven’t they been chased before, been jumped in their own motel room, found evidence of HYDRA in the most innocent-looking places? The agents they encounter are always in pairs. And he thinks even someone without those experiences would admit that this is exactly the sort of spot HYDRA would choose for an ambush: mostly deserted, low security, the only thing around for miles.

Though he can’t even pretend to himself that he’s suspicious anymore, Bucky keeps watching the couple as they lean on their car and drink their pop. Looking around at the scrubby grasslands, talking together, trading smiles. He thinks, again, of what he said to Steve this morning, the longing that hasn’t left him, though he’s kept quiet about it. He meant what he said; he knows, anyway, that there’s only so much he can say when they need to stay focused on the job at hand. But they look so happy, standing there, an easy harmony between them that Bucky had thought he’d forgotten.

It’s not that he doesn’t understand, he thinks: the response he should have given Steve this morning, though he hadn’t been able to articulate it at the time. He knows how far away it feels, how inaccessible: up until a couple days ago, it had seemed impossible. Not just that—it had been unreal. Any thoughts of leaving the road, living somewhere, filling his hands with something other than weapons, had been nothing more than dreams he’d lost upon waking.

He can see, watching the women, the way they look at each other, how it would look to Steve, after year upon year of being shuttled from mission to mission, from cryo to the chair and back again. Like something someone else might want, but not something for him. Not something to touch with bare hands. And yet, Bucky thinks—Steve has touched it. They both have. It was theirs, for the briefest of moments.

Evening is falling fast, the stars emerging into the purple-blue sky, and the women drive away, the sound of their music fading quickly as they pull out of the lot. His distraction gone, something like grief sitting bitter in his chest, Bucky looks around to find the others; he spots Sam and Natasha walking together toward him from the grass on the other side of the parking lot. Steve, he can see only as a black silhouette against the darkening landscape, farther away, out of reach of the rest stop lights.

Movement, out of the corner of his eye—Bucky turns without thinking, instinctually ducking to crouch behind the car. He doesn’t even know what he saw: an animal, probably, or even a cloud across the moon making the shadows shift. Then he hears footsteps on the asphalt, hears Sam stop talking. He realizes in the moment’s silence that he was watching the wrong car. He thinks: _not again._

He twists just in time to see the hands coming, but not quickly enough to avoid them—but the shot he expects doesn’t come; instead there’s the cool kiss of a wire stretched tight across his throat. He thrashes a moment, the faceless agent pressed so close he can feel their breath on the back of his head, then shakes himself out of his frustrated paralysis and lets himself fall backward, twisting as he goes. They hit the pavement and the agent lets out a muffled grunt, the garrote loosening enough for Bucky to pull it away slightly—the thin wire cutting into his fingers—and gasp in a breath. “Steve,” he rasps, the sound too weak to carry far—the agent shifts beneath him and Bucky thrusts his elbow down—there’s a huff of breath against his ear and the wire slackens further; he yanks it away and out of the agent’s grip entirely. Throws it away from himself, more angry than horrified.

He’s up before his lungs are full again, turning around to meet the agent as they spring to their feet. He ducks out of the way of the first blow and comes up, grabs their shoulder as they pivot past him, and throws them back to the ground. One knee on the agent’s chest, the other pinning his wrist, and he can see that it’s a young man staring up at him, wide-eyed, but with his free hand scrabbling at something in his belt. A knife, Bucky thinks, but there’s no way he can avoid it—

There’s a shot, a shudder, and the agent stills beneath him. Bucky blinks, uncomprehending, at the blood spreading from the man’s head—and then he looks up and sees Natasha lowering her pistol, hurrying forward to help him up. He waves her off, still gasping, and she turns and runs—away from the car, out into the dark.

Bucky listens hard, forces himself to hold his breath. He hears rustling grasses, the thud of blows landing, someone snarling words too far away to catch. He squints and sees a flash of silver, but hesitates—he doesn’t have a gun— _sloppy_ —it’s tucked into the back of the passenger’s seat. He turns back to the agent and takes the knife from his open hand, grips it tight as he runs after Natasha, dragging himself back into action. He passes another body, crumpled over the curb, the face half-hidden but unfamiliar.

There are more agents, he sees as he approaches: four more, and Natasha, Steve, and Sam are fighting hard, but they’re outnumbered, and it’s clear they, too, were taken by surprise. Bucky throws himself at the closest agent, stabs out with the knife and sees the man flinch back, sees him go rigid: he falls, and Steve’s standing where he was, a knife in his hand as well. “Duck,” Steve says, and Bucky does; the knife swishes over his head and someone groans. When he turns, though, the second agent’s still standing, clutching at his stomach, raising his gun. Bucky lunges forward and forces his arm up, and the agent brings his elbow down into the side of Bucky’s head, but Bucky’s closer now and hefts his knife—plants his feet—drives the blade in, gritting his teeth, snarling his rage into the agent’s ear.

A shot rings out just as the agent falls away from him, and Bucky flinches without knowing where the noise came from. It’s Natasha, he sees, and she fires again but her gun clicks on an empty chamber. She drops it and darts to one side as the agent gets his gun up and fires; Bucky doesn’t wait to watch more, but bends down to pick up the gun from the agent he just stabbed. He comes up and sights, shoots—the agent goes down with a cry, and Natasha’s head whips around to him.

It’s the last one, he realizes, breathless in the sudden quiet: relief and a rising horror warring within him. Sam, too, is straightening, his lip bloodied but otherwise apparently unhurt. “Shit,” he says, bracing his hands on his knees, “everyone okay?”

Bucky looks around, back toward Steve. “They didn’t get you—?” His foot snags as he turns, and he catches sight of Steve’s eyes going wide before he registers that there’s a hand wrapped around his ankle. He drops the moment he realizes, down onto the caught leg, pinning the arm that’s holding him. He tries to stab backward with the knife that’s still in his hand, but the agent raises an arm to block it. “God _dammit,”_ Bucky snarls, but his leg is free now—he spins on his knee, brings his other hand around, puts the gun under the man’s chin—his finger on the trigger—

“Wait—” someone says behind him.

Bucky hesitates, then flinches out of instinct—but the man doesn’t swing at him. His hand, the one that isn’t pinned, is clenched around the handle of Steve’s knife, still stuck in his gut, and Bucky can feel sticky warmth all along his leg where it’s pressed up against the man’s side—the wound Bucky gave him, the knife still wet in his hand.

“Wait,” Sam repeats, panting, coming closer, his hand touching Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky shakes him off, his breath hissing out through his teeth, and Sam doesn’t try again.

He takes in the man in front of him: eyes wide open and fixed on Bucky’s face, sweat on his skin, a grimace tugging at his mouth. Blood seeping around the hand clamped against his stomach. His breath searing his throat, his lungs, Bucky pulls his gun away. Stands up, unsteady; takes a step back.

Natasha steps in close, then, angling herself so that she’s facing away from the agent on the ground. “Barnes,” she says softly, “we can question him. See if he knows anything about where they’re keeping her.”

There’s a hard look on her face, the tinge of alarm still there in her eyes. Bucky wonders—is that alarm there for him? Or because of the agent, whose wounds give him minutes at most and who is making a harsh wheezing noise? “Sure,” he says, matching her volume. “We need to know.” He stows his gun in his belt, hefts the knife more firmly in the palm of his hand. He always hates this part.

But when he turns back to the agent, the man is gazing up at him, some pained, crazed look in his eyes, shining in the moonlight. His face twists, the grimace contorting into a smile. “You’re looking for her, huh?” the man rasps. “That kid?” He gives another terrible wheeze: a laugh, Bucky realizes, something in him going cold. “You’re gonna be too late. She’s gonna be—just like him.” The man cuts his eyes past Bucky, to Steve, behind him.

Bucky can’t help it; he looks back, following the agent’s gaze. He sees Steve standing there, weaponless, left arm gleaming. His eyes are fixed on the agent, and on his face is—not the horror Bucky expects to see, not even anger. A raw and broken expression that pulls something taut in Bucky. Makes him think of the helicarrier with Steve’s leg pinned beneath the girder: a frantic animal with no way out. All of Bucky’s exhaustion, his wish to be anywhere but here, vanishes at the sight of that expression.

He turns back to the agent, still coughing up that choking laughter, and moves in. He catches the way Sam steps toward him as he does, the caution in every line of his body clear even peripherally, but Bucky brings the knife up to the agent’s throat and no further. “Where is she?” he growls. The man stares at him. “Tell me where she is.” He grips the man’s shoulder with his other hand and shakes him roughly, through with waiting. They’ve come too far for this; he’s too fucking _old_ for this.

The man groans at the movement, but he’s still smiling. “Fuck you,” he grits out. He looks past Bucky to Steve again and says, “There won’t be anyone for you to save when we’re done with her—”

Blood pounding in his ears, electricity in his fingertips. Bucky switches his grip on the knife, presses it in slightly, and he doesn’t even know what he plans to do—but the man bites down on something, stares at Bucky even as he goes rigid and his mouth starts to foam, choking on what Bucky realizes is cyanide. “Hail—”

He falls back with a gurgle and is still. Bucky rises and puts his knife away: he doesn’t need it now; there’s no one left, bodies litter the ground around them like burlap sacks. He can’t feel his feet where they’re planted in the grass, doesn’t feel Natasha as she brushes past him. He feels—he feels—dirty. Filthy. Like something that should never have lived. He lifts his eyes from Natasha, searching the limp body, and sees Sam watching him, but he looks away when Bucky notices. Bucky can’t tell what he’s thinking and can’t bear to try to parse it out, so he turns to Steve, his mouth open but with no words to fill it.

Steve, who’s standing there with a look on his face like he knows what Bucky’s feeling: like he feels it too. The weariness that could break his back, the horror and the blood, the endlessness of it. Bucky takes half a step toward him, hesitant, and then another, and Steve catches him, holds him. He knows Steve would hold him up if he were to fall, and Bucky would do the same. He screws his face up against Steve’s shoulder, clutches at the solid warmth of his body and breathes in time with Steve’s pulse, so steady where Bucky’s trips and stumbles on every other beat.


	5. Chapter 5

Steve goes with Sam to hide the bodies, dragging them off toward the fringe of trees in the distance. With Natasha, then, Bucky combs the thin grass for guns, knives, anything they might have dropped. They bring what they’ve gathered back to the car, and there they find the body of the agent who tried to strangle Bucky, cold now, lying in a puddle of gummy blood.

They blink at him a moment. Then Natasha hands the weapons in her hands to Bucky and drops to one knee, facing away. Bucky realizes she’s searching him, patting him down for anything else they can use or wouldn’t want found, and shoves the detritus of the battle into the trunk. There’s blood drying on his hands, on his clothes. He braces himself with his hands on the cool metal of the car and shakes his head to clear it, leftover adrenaline buzzing behind his eyes.

Still crouched over the dead agent, Natasha says, “So, Wilson tells me you and Rogers are an item now.”

It’s so at odds with the situation that for a moment Bucky thinks he’s misheard. He twists to stare at Natasha, and she shoots him a grin over her shoulder. “What else did he tell you?” Bucky asks. He wonders if he’s about to get another talk about his fitness for the job.

“Nothing,” she says. He can’t see her face, and her voice is the usual blank slate, but Bucky doesn’t think it’s a lie. “I think it’s good,” she says. “Isn’t that what we all want—shared life experience?”

Again, Bucky finds himself feeling wrong-footed. He’d expected an answer with teeth, not—this, whatever it is, earnestness or something like it. In his confusion, the exhaustion washes over him in a wave. He watches her pat down the agent’s legs, removing a tiny knife from his boot and running her thumb gently over the blade to test its sharpness. Apparently it passes inspection, because she tucks it carefully into her own boot. “Wilson told me I shouldn’t let myself get distracted,” he tells her when she looks up and catches his gaze. “I figured you’d agree with him.”

She stands with a smile quirking the edge of her mouth. “Wilson’s been burned a couple times,” she says, coming over to set the grenade from the agent’s belt in the trunk as well. “He’s cautious.”

“And you haven’t?”

Natasha shuts the trunk and faces him full-on. “You gotta live for something, Barnes.” She walks back to the agent and lifts the body by the arms, the head lolling grotesquely. “Help me with this guy?”

Bucky takes the other end of the agent’s body, hefting a leg in each hand. “I thought you lived for the fight,” he says as they start an awkward shuffle out of the parking lot. “You’ve got the skill set to make a career out of it, you’ve said it yourself.”

She doesn’t speak until they’ve got the agent up over the curb and are passing the sidewalk. “That’s part of it,” she says at last. “But the fight’s just a fight if you do it long enough, no matter who you’re working for.”

He glances up, but she’s focused on keeping the body high enough so it doesn’t drag on the ground. There’s a slight bitter edge to her voice that makes him wonder, though. “You ever think about doing something else?” he asks. “Getting out?”

At that, she does look up: a startling shrewdness in her gaze. “Why,” she asks, “are _you_ thinking about it?”

“Romanoff,” he sighs, “just answer the question.” Which, he knows, is as much an admission as anything.

She snorts. “Sure, I’ve thought about it.”

Bucky waits for more, but she doesn’t elaborate, instead twisting around slightly to check how close they are to the trees. As if it’s the most obvious answer in the world. “And?” he presses. “What made you stay?”

She looks back around, half-smiling again. “Nothing,” she says. “Nothing made me. I chose it.” She catches his eye-roll and shakes her head. “That’s the point, Barnes. The Red Room made me do their dirty work. With SHIELD, it was my choice.” Her smile sours slightly. “Didn’t turn out too great, all things considered.”

“So why not leave?” Bucky asks, the desperation he feels finally seeping through into his voice: he hears it, but he can’t stop it. “Why are you still doing this?”

“I’m going to assume you don’t mean this, specifically,” she replies dryly, nodding to indicate the general scene around them. “You know we’ve got to stop what they’re doing to that kid.” At Bucky’s scoff of agreement, she says, “I thought it was because I owed Barton, for a while. And then I thought—I’ve got all this training, I guess I should use it. Like you said.” They’ve reached the trees: she drops the agent without ceremony, wiping her hands on her thighs.

“But?” Bucky prompts, dragging the agent’s feet over so they’re fully hidden in the brush.

“But I’m atoning,” she says, frowning down at the agent’s ruined face. “I did what I did—no getting around that. But I think as a free agent I can start putting some of it right on my own terms.”

“Doesn’t seem like much of a choice,” he tells her. “You’re still just trading one fight for another.”

They step out of the trees and stand there a moment, checking their work, making sure there’s no signs of the body. “Maybe not,” she acknowledges when they turn and start walking back toward the rest stop. “But it’s my choice, not yours.”

But, Bucky thinks: it could be his choice. They have the same skill set, or close to it. She’s been fighting her whole life, just as he has. Both of them worked for SHIELD; both of them were set adrift when SHIELD toppled. “I,” he says—carefully, haltingly, feeling it out, “I don’t think it’s about that, for me. Maybe it was at the start—before.” Back when he’d been trying to fill the emptiness inside of him, when he’d thought that gulf could be filled, when he’d thought he could keep Steve’s memory alive instead of trying to forget and save himself the pain. Back before Steve had barrelled into his life again and ripped him out of his numbness. “But I think, now, it’s just—just inertia. I’m doing this ‘cause I’ve always done it. ‘Cause it’s better than standing still.”

Natasha’s silent for a moment, long enough that Bucky wonders if there’s some other enemy she’s just spotted. When he looks over, though, she’s gazing at him sidelong, considering. “And if you did stand still?” she asks. “What would you do?”

“I don’t know,” he admits, quietly. Ahead of them he can see that Sam and Steve have started the car, the headlights white against the dark. “I don’t even know where I’d go,” he tells her. In that, too, he can sympathize with Steve; there are no details in the future Bucky wants, only abstractions. But he does want it, still.

“When I thought about leaving,” Natasha says slowly, “I thought I’d have to—go somewhere I’d never been, be reborn somehow into a different person. I thought that was the only way to move on. I didn’t have anyone, then, to tell me otherwise.”

“You still don’t,” Bucky points out. “You stayed in.”

She levels a look at him that wants to be a glare but isn’t cold enough. “But you’ve got Rogers,” she says. “You know he’d go with you, right?”

Bucky doesn’t respond; they’ve reached the parking lot. He just nods at Natasha and slides into the back seat next to Steve, who reaches for his hand, giving him a worried, searching look. Bucky smiles at him and the furrow in Steve’s brow eases somewhat.

Natasha’s right, Bucky thinks as they pull out of the lot: he knows she’s right. Steve would follow him if he were to leave. But—Bucky won’t force him to. Not after everything else that’s been forced on Steve; Bucky isn’t his handler, but it feels too much like an ultimatum, like an order. Steve falls asleep after a couple minutes, his temple resting on the window, and Bucky watches the highway lights pass softly over his face, and he thinks—if this is the peace they can have, these moments snatched between days and nights of horror, then he’ll take it. If this is how Steve can return to him, then he’ll take it all.

———

**APPROX. LOCATION: CARDWELL, MONTANA**

There are no lights when Bucky opens his eyes, no streetlamps or storefront signs, but he can tell Steve’s awake, too: he can’t see him well, but he can feel his fingers carding gently through Bucky’s hair. When Bucky shifts slightly, his neck stiff from sleeping upright, Steve pulls away. He’s just a silhouette in the dim interior of the car, but Bucky can see him incline his head toward the window beside him, the invitation clear.

They come around to the trunk of the car, under the sky lit with stars but no moon. Steve reaches for Bucky at once—presses a kiss to his temple, crushing him close, both their bodies still warm with sleep. Bucky smiles at the touch and turns his head to meet Steve’s lips with his own. “Hey,” he murmurs.

“Hey,” Steve replies. After a moment he steps back half a step and leans on the trunk of the car, tugging Bucky over beside him. They’re close together, there, taking up each other’s space, hemming in their elbows. Then Steve twists, pulls something out of his belt: a gun, Bucky sees.

As he watches, Steve starts disassembling the pistol with his usual quick, practiced movements: magazine, slide, barrel, reverse. The little sounds seem louder than usual in the pre-dawn calm, the metal dark as the lingering night. Unease settles back into Bucky’s limbs, heavier than the weight of sleep. He recognizes this restlessness from his own mind, the need to move, to have something in his hands that he can use. It’s always there, but especially before a fight. “You okay?” he asks softly.

Steve doesn’t answer right away: fair enough, Bucky supposes. It wasn’t a great question. “I keep thinking about what they’re doing to her,” Steve says after a minute.

Bucky nods. “Do you,” he begins, and hesitates— “do you think,” he asks, “they would’ve started—working on her, by now?” He doesn’t want to say it aloud, but it’s been needling at him for days, ever since the base in Lanesboro. If they’re too late—

For just a moment, Steve’s hands falter. “Maybe,” he says. “She’s been missing for a month. They’ve had enough time to—to get started.”

It’s Bucky’s worst fears, confirmed. He wonders what HYDRA would do first—if they would replace flesh with metal, like Steve’s arm, or go straight for the chair, or— “The serum,” he says, feeling hollow with dread, “that lab we found in Nebraska.” He swallows down his revulsion. Tries to convince himself otherwise: maybe the lab was a failure, maybe they made it wrong, maybe whoever was running that place left before they finished the job. But they can’t be sure. They don’t know.

“The serum on its own can only do so much,” Steve says, his eyes on the gun in his hands, still moving smoothly through the rhythm of dis- and re-assembly. “It doesn’t do the whole job—look at yourself.”

He says it matter-of-factly, without any bitterness, but Bucky still isn’t prepared to hear it. “Even if that’s all they do,” he says, “it’s too much.”

“I know,” Steve says, looking up.

There’s a kindness in his eyes, an understanding, and it’s more than Bucky can bear. Bucky looks away, blinking. He doesn’t want to think about what would mean, the—the long life, the healing, the otherness—and the words of the agent from last night come back to him: _there won’t be anyone for you to save when we’re done with her_ —no. He won’t think about it. They’ll get Amanda out of there before anyone touches her. He curls his hands around nothing, his fingers numb with the chill in the air. Autumn is coming, he thinks faintly. It’s been a long summer.

“Buck.” Steve’s fingers in his hair, gentle on the back of his neck. Bucky turns around and meets his eyes, colorless at this hour, full of stars. “We’ll stop them. We’ll save her.” His mouth twists at the corner with something—fear, maybe, or doubt, Bucky can’t tell. “I have to believe that,” he says, and it almost sounds like pleading.

It breaks Bucky’s heart. “I know,” he says, and gathers Steve to him, pulling him in. He guides Steve’s head down to rest under his chin; though they don’t fit the way they used to, Steve lets it happen, breathes out softly. Bucky swallows hard, presses his lips to Steve’s hair.

He feels it when Steve inhales: when he tenses slightly, as if to pull away. Bucky lets him go, offers him a small smile. Steve returns it, then— “I’ve been thinking,” he murmurs, “about what you said.” He hesitates. “About leaving.”

He says it calmly, with no hint of the anguish from yesterday, but Bucky shakes his head all the same. “It’s not—you don’t have to,” he says, tripping over his own words. “I said I wouldn’t force you, and I—I won’t. I mean that, Stevie.”

“I know you do.” He takes a deep breath as if to speak, then lets it out again, his gaze downcast, his brow furrowed. “I—it’s funny, I—” He looks up again, still frowning. “You want to know why,” he asks, “I thought you were my handler?”

Bucky’s not sure he does want to know, but he nods, his mouth suddenly dry.

“Because I would’ve done anything for you,” Steve tells him. “I knew that better than—better than my own name. I loved you so much”—he shakes his head slightly, like he still can’t believe it—“but I didn’t know it was love. I thought I was just afraid.” He takes Bucky’s hand from where it rests on the cold metal of the car, gently weaving their fingers together. “Every other handler had to teach me to comply, drill it into me, and you didn’t even have to say a word—”

“But—” Bucky can hardly get the words out, the revulsion is so strong. “But I don’t want—”

“I know,” Steve says again, softly, “I know. I figured it out. You don’t want me to follow orders.”

Bucky shakes his head, still half-choked with horror. “No.”

“It took me a while to get it.” Steve takes a breath in, slow, like he’s still trying to find the words. “That you could love me without controlling me. That it could be a—a decision, to follow you.”

Listening to him say it so simply—when it’s felt like anything but a choice for so long, the two of them tied together, following each other into hell and back—it puts an ache in Bucky’s chest, a deep hurt he can’t escape and doesn’t want to. “I do love you,” he says. God, he does. “But if you don’t want to go, then—”

“I don’t know,” Steve says slowly, “what I want. I’ve always had a mission to tell me that.” There’s more hesitation than before; his hand shifts in Bucky’s. “But I know you make me happy, and I—I would be happy, with you, if—” He looks away, convulsively.

Bucky waits, gives him time, though each heartbeat of the silence is painful. He follows Steve’s gaze, staring out at the grayish dark, the hills just barely lightening, the mountains in the distance still night-black against the fading stars.

“If I could just know,” Steve says at length, softly, as if the very possibility will vanish if he speaks too loud, “that I’m not just a weapon—that there’s more in me than what they put there.” He looks back to Bucky, then, and the expression on his face is—fear, plain and simple. He looks like he did on the helicarrier, the terror wild and instinctive; he looks like he’s falling from the train and still hasn’t hit the bottom.

“Hey,” Bucky says, his voice cracking on the word. “It’s okay, Stevie.” He brings his hands to Steve’s face, holds him there just as Steve held him yesterday: says, “You know me, huh? Even after everything?”

Steve tilts his head sideways, into Bucky’s palm. He nods.

“So I know you, too,” Bucky tells him.

“I know you do,” Steve says. He lifts his hand to cover Bucky’s where it rests against his jaw. “But I need to—to figure it out for myself.” He smiles minutely, as if he’s trying to soften the words. “I need to find out what’s left over, when I take out the parts HYDRA gave me.”

Bucky holds his gaze. It’s hard to hear, to know that Bucky’s trust isn’t enough for Steve—but in a way, he thinks he understands. He knew Steve before HYDRA took him, and he still knew him when he was emptied out, in D.C.; he’s anything but unbiased. It still hurts. “I love you,” he says again. He shuts his eyes for a moment, half-wishing for the night to return, for time to just—stop, at least for a while. “I want you to figure it out. You should—do what you need to do.”

When he opens his eyes, Steve turns his head and kisses Bucky’s palm. Bucky tugs him forward, kisses him for real, hard, as if it’s the last time. It could be, Bucky knows—but then, so could each time they do this. Steve kisses him back, sighing against his mouth; Bucky can feel Steve’s pulse in the hand he raises to rest against Bucky’s neck.

The moment after they break apart lasts for an eternity; it drags on in the chalky colors of morning, the world slowly waking up around them. Dew clinging to the scrubby grass at the sides of the road, the first birds singing, the gravel still cool beneath their feet. With his forehead pressed to Bucky’s, Steve whispers, “I want you there with me, you know. Every step of the way.” There’s just enough light to see the barest hint of blue in his eyes.

“Are you kidding?” Bucky murmurs back. “There’s no getting rid of me, you punk.” He smiles at Steve, who chuckles, the sound low and warm between them.

———

It doesn’t look like the place for a HYDRA base: someone’s old ranch hidden in a wide valley, abandoned for years or decades, stables, barn, and house all in various states of disrepair, the pasture fence rotted completely away in places. Bucky can see, though, from a glance at the others, that they aren’t comforted by it any more than he is. The sun is just starting to spill into the valley as they pick their way along the ingoing road, so overgrown it’s barely recognizable as such, and as they pass under the lopsided iron gate, Natasha murmurs, “Think they know we’re here?”

“If they don’t,” Sam replies, “they definitely know we’re coming.”

They move as one into the shadow of the barn, staying away from the open pasture. There’s no sign that anyone’s here or has even been here—no cars, not even any tracks in the grass. They slip into the barn, but it’s empty: the hayloft collapsed, the tractor in the middle more rust than anything else.

It puts an itch under Bucky’s skin, the nagging feeling of being watched that’s followed him all this time and has led to nothing again and again. “This doesn’t make sense,” he says, his voice echoing strangely in the dim space. “They just sent, what, six agents after us? And they’re letting us just walk around?”

“They’ll be digging in,” Steve says. “Letting us come to them.”

They cluster in the large doorway of the barn, peering out at the lightening field. “Where, though?” Bucky asks, knowing no one can tell him. From here they can see the other outbuildings—stable, toolshed, granary—and the house, any one of them a possible hiding place. It doesn’t seem like a great idea, though, to run back and forth across the open fields checking each one.

Natasha seems to be thinking along the same lines. “If they’re watching us already,” she says, “then we probably only get one shot.” She looks between the three of them. “Want to try the house?”

Their shadows are long, stretching out across the grass ahead of them. They’re exposed and moving quickly, no cover between the barn and the house. Bucky keeps his head on a swivel to catch any movement from the other buildings or from the hills, but there’s nothing, only Steve at his side with a pistol in his hand, casting quick glances at him every few steps. They move silently into formation as they approach the patchy grass in front of the house, Natasha pausing a moment to glance back at the rest of them. Sam nods and she steps forward.

At the same moment, Steve gasps and makes a quick movement, and Bucky sees it out of the corner of his eye—an instinctive flinch, like jumping back from a snake—and something pulls tight in Bucky’s gut, sudden and painful, a fear he can’t trace or explain. It’s too late to stop her without alerting anyone nearby. He reaches down and his fingers close on a rock—he tosses it past her, into the no-man’s-land between them and the house.

She half-turns, hearing Steve’s breath and his sudden movement, the rock still moving through the air. Then it lands, and the morning bursts. The force of the blast knocks Bucky backward and he has a split-second view of the sky, thin clouds shot through with gold, before he clamps his eyes shut and the heat washes over him. The sound, fading, rings in his ears even as he forces himself to a crouch, grit stinging in the palms of his hands, dizzy and staring anywhere but toward the blast, but it doesn’t help, he’s still half-blind from the glare of the flames and the dust in his eyes—

And then there’s a hand on his arm, pulling him to his feet, and he sees Natasha sitting up from where she’s been thrown, Sam rising, staring around through the smoke that’s now filling the air. Bucky finds that it’s Steve next to him, his grip vice-like, his face full of dirt and ash, his eyes strikingly blue against the gray. His mouth moves but whatever he says is inaudible; Bucky understands it anyway, darting over to Natasha and pulling her up— “Come on, come on, _go—”_ dragging each other along, Steve and Sam on their heels, up the stairs and into the house.

Bucky’s the first through the door and he braces for an ambush, but the room inside is dark and completely empty of any people: in the gloom, he can make out a couch and coffee table, a glass-fronted cabinet, all of it worn and dusty. He draws his gun and heads into the next room as the others file in behind him. It turns out to be a tiny kitchen, faint sun coming through the gauzy, moth-eaten curtains onto a table and cupboards, some of them hanging open to show empty shelves. Footsteps behind him—Bucky turns, his heart pounding—and it’s Steve, coming forward into the sunlight.

“Are you all right?” Steve asks in a hush, looking him over.

“I’m fine,” Bucky says, matching Steve’s volume. His throat’s coated with dust; the words come out in a rasp. “You?”

“Fine.” Steve’s mouth twists. “I dropped my gun.” He shakes his head when Bucky offers his up, handle-first. “You’re the sharpshooter,” he points out, a faint touch of amusement in his voice. “You keep it.”

Bucky doesn’t argue, but he pulls the knife from his belt and hands it to Steve. “Then take this.” Steve’s fingers brush his on the handle as he takes it. There’s something, Bucky thinks, in the way he’s standing—not injured, but still brittle, somehow, like a coiled spring. “Stevie,” Bucky says, even softer than before: “What’s—?”

Steve’s gaze meets his, his eyes turned water-clear in the dim light. “They’ll have heard the explosion,” he says. “If they know we’re coming—”

A moment of incomprehension, and then the dread curled in the pit of Bucky’s stomach knots itself tighter. “Oh,” he says. “They’ll punish her.”

More forcefully than he needs to, Steve shoves the knife into his belt. “If it’s anything like what they did to me.”

Horror, then, sick and hot: there would have been punishment, Bucky thinks, in D.C., after the bridge. It’s not a new thought, but it takes on a new awfulness with Steve standing in front of him. “Maybe,” he says, “maybe if she thinks we’re coming to help, it’ll give her some hope.”

Armed with that chance, slight as it is, they rejoin the others and search the house. Top to bottom, there’s nothing but dust and moldy carpet—and steps to the lower level, descending down into darkness.

The basement is long and low, half of it lined with shelves that must once have held pickling jars; the air is cool on Bucky’s skin. They move through the space cautiously, but it strikes Bucky that the room is longer than the house appeared from the outside, extending into the back fields, away from where the mines were. Just as he forms the thought, their light hits the back wall: solid concrete with metal studs set into the cement. In the middle, a door of heavy metal. Beside it is a tiny panel with a keypad and no screen.

“If we break that down,” Bucky says, taking it in, “they’ll know right where we are.”

“Those mines were a warning,” Sam says. “I’d bet good money they already do.”

Natasha snorts. “Lucky for us, we don’t have to blow anything else up.” She steps forward and studies the keypad. “Wilson, bring that light over here.”

When Sam moves closer with the flashlight, Bucky looks again to Steve. He can’t make out much, just a deeper shadow against the black, his eyes the barest glimmer in the darkness. He’s looking back. Neither of them speak, but Steve’s hand brushes against Bucky’s, holds it tightly—just for a moment.

Something behind the door _clunks_ into place. Experimentally, Natasha pushes on it, and it swings smoothly inward, more quickly than Bucky would expect from its weight.

Beyond is a tunnel, lit with the usual fluorescents, featureless as far as they can see. They step inside, no hesitation: Bucky considers suggesting that they wait, or try to scope it out, but what would be the point? There’s no way but forward, now, just like he told Steve upstairs, and the longer they delay, the more time HYDRA has to move against them.

Even so, the length of the tunnel is daunting; they walk for long seconds stretching into a minute, and then two, with only a couple right-angle turns to mark their progress. The feeling of pressure grows. _Something_ has to happen, Bucky thinks with an irritation that’s almost mundane.

Apparently sharing his sentiment, Natasha whispers, “This must be to protect from mine damage. In case a bunch of idiots go charging up to the front of the house.”

Sam snorts, a dark smile on his face. “Who knew HYDRA had so many goddamn engineers?”

“You know,” Natasha replies, “I bet Stark would have a—”

She falls silent, and Bucky doesn’t have to guess why. Ahead, there’s a door set into the right side of the tunnel: he can see a sliver of cement wall beyond it. Natasha creeps forward, Sam right behind her, and Bucky follows close after, but he’s thinking it doesn’t make sense—why would HYDRA let them get so close, walk right in—

Natasha swears and Bucky braces for an ambush, but before he can so much as flinch they’re all clustered in the doorway, peering over Natasha’s shoulders. Bucky finds himself gazing without seeing—not wanting to see—as the room arranges itself into shapes he knows, and knows well. A long metal table with straps, an overturned bucket, bright silvery things strewn across the floor... There’s a drain, Bucky realizes, in the middle, the tiled floor slanting ever so slightly down to it. A hose coiled in the corner like a thick black snake.

Beside him, Steve lets out a breath like he’s been punched, staring at the hose with an expression as blank as the walls around them. Bucky puts a hand on his shoulder, but he takes as much comfort from the touch as he gives, shuddering at what’s before them. The only scent here is old air, but Bucky swears he can smell the burning again, the sharp scent of smoke and something sweeter. He gags, turns his eyes from the table.

She’s here. He knows it now if he hadn’t been convinced before; the proof of it rises up to meet him, and he can look away, but he can’t avoid it. He realizes there had been a part of him that had hoped, against everything, that they were following a false trail—an absurd hope, but undeniably real as it dies.

Sam is sending them concerned glances, but he’s focused on examining the room with Natasha, taking account of the table, the hose, the valve on the wall. Natasha’s foot nudges one of the small silver items on the floor and it skitters away, the sound unexpectedly loud in the small space and even more startling after so much silence. Steve flinches, hard, his face contorting and then smoothing out again, his right hand clenched so hard around the handle of his knife that Bucky thinks it might break.

Bucky bends down and picks the thing up. It’s a scalpel, he sees, the blade winking under the harsh lights.

“We need to go,” Natasha says, rising from her crouch at the base of the table. “It’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel if they catch us in here.”

They file out into the tunnel again and keep moving. The tension crackles in Bucky’s fingers, makes him jump at the sound of their own footsteps. They turn a corner, and another, and come on a stretch of tunnel that’s different from the rest: wider, suddenly, more like a long room than a hallway. At the end of the room the tunnel continues, but there are two other branches on either wall, and more doors as well.

A moment of silence, a lurch in his stomach—

The shots come from three directions at once, and it’s only because they haven’t gone more than a few steps into the room that they aren’t riddled with bullets immediately. Bucky drops to the floor at once, Steve half on top of him, Natasha shouting something incomprehensible over the noise. After a moment, there’s a blast—a grenade, he thinks, thrown—exploding at the mouth of the middle corridor. Bucky covers his face against the blast, but it’s barely over before he can feel Steve scrambling up and off of him—he opens his eyes to see Steve throwing himself into that same open tunnel.

There’s a new jolt of panic as Bucky remembers that Steve’s armed only with a knife, but he can’t dwell on it: figures are coming from the other two tunnels, too many to count at once. Sam’s quicker than Bucky, on his feet already, meeting the first group with his teeth bared. Bucky pushes himself up and runs forward, but the first agent he takes aim at falls before he can fire. In his place stands Steve, a pistol in his metal hand.

The fighting, then, is the only thing Bucky knows: bloody and messy and too quick for thought. Sight, shoot, new target. His pulse hammers louder than the gunshots in his ears. They’ve nearly made it to the far corridor, to somewhere they can put a wall against their backs, when the sound of more boots comes thundering toward them. They have a moment to brace, but it isn’t enough, and Bucky can feel himself getting lost in the crush—there are too many, his hands slippery with blood, the breath burning in his lungs. He’s bleeding from his nose now, sweat in his eyes. It feels, he thinks disjointedly, like a police raid back in Brooklyn, the same overwhelming onslaught.

At some point his gun is empty; Bucky tosses it aside and takes a pistol from his opponent’s belt, earning himself a blow to the side of the head to boot. He doesn’t care, though—he spots Steve nearby going toe-to-toe with two agents at once, a third about to join, swinging something that looks, to Bucky’s panicked eyes, like an honest-to-god machete. For one frozen second, Bucky catches a glimpse of Steve’s face, the wild-animal look of him as he fights.

It lights a fire under him like nothing else has: yelling, he crashes into the thicket of agents around Steve and shoots, shoots again, hears Steve saying his name but doesn’t look, feels the machete graze his ribs, drawing a hot line of pain there. Bucky grabs the agent’s arm and bends it until the blade clatters to the floor. The man twists out of his grip and reaches for it, but Bucky’s gun is at his head before he can touch the handle; he fires, and the agent falls.

Footsteps closing in—he turns, ready, and shoots at the woman who’s charging toward him, but she doesn’t stop. There’s no time to fire again, so Bucky catches her as she comes at him—holds her off for a moment, her momentum forcing him to dig in his heels—and drives her backward, hears the terrible noise and choking gasp as Steve stabs her from behind. Bucky drops her when she goes limp, stumbles back a step and presses a hand to his ribs in the momentary calm.

Steve steps over her body, his gaze still somewhat frantic, reaching out but not touching. “Are you—?”

“It’s not deep,” Bucky tells him, wincing but removing his hand: he won’t bleed out.

Steve nods, his breath coming in uneven gasps, and turns away, hefting his knife, but—there’s no one else. The fight has taken them through the long room now, into a new hall without any doors, empty except for the bodies on the floor. The sudden quiet is more terrifying than the ambush had been, and Bucky realizes with a surge of horror that Sam and Natasha aren’t with them. He can see the same knowledge on Steve’s face, and they turn as one back the way they came, only for the other two to come bursting in, slamming the door on the long room as soon as they’re through it.

“There’s more,” Natasha says, wiping blood out of her eyes as it spills from a thin cut on her forehead. She’s holding the door with her other hand, her fingers pressed over Sam’s on the handle, both of them winded.

Bucky hears it now: the sounds of pursuit, many feet on the concrete and getting closer. At the same time, a noise comes from the other direction, down the hall that extends ahead of them—a scream, something garbled that he can’t quite decipher, cutting off suddenly. More faintly, the sound of another voice, deep and raised in anger.

Steve takes off at once and Bucky goes after him, but he stops as the door rattles on its hinges—looking back, he sees Sam and Natasha bracing against it, each of them holding their weapons at the ready. They see him pause and Natasha shakes her head at him. “Go,” she says, her voice tight: not afraid, but thin and tense enough to snap. “Go, we’ll hold them off.”

Bucky stays where he is, the doubt freezing him as it hasn’t done for years. “There’s too many,” he says. He can hear the agents piling against the door, ramming it all at once. The floor is slick, and he can tell it’s hard for Sam and Natasha to keep their footing. “You’ll be overrun, you can’t—”

“Barnes,” Sam cuts across him, and his eyes are hard. The hand holding his gun is bloody and shakes, slightly, as Bucky watches. He points with his chin at the tunnel where Steve’s gone, his face twisted with the effort of holding the door, but there’s no doubt there. No hesitation as he says, “Get that girl the fuck out of here.”

So Bucky turns and runs, around the first corner and down the long hall that follows, and he barrels through the door into a room smaller than the last, most of the space taken up by Steve fighting hand-to-hand with another band of agents. He pauses a moment, expecting one of them to break away and come for him, but they don’t—and then he sees, past the fighting, a scarred and square-jawed man hanging back near the wall—and behind him, Amanda. There’s dirt on her face and in her matted hair, and she’s bleeding from a scrape on her jaw, but she’s alive, she’s here: saying something inaudible to the man standing in front of her, her expression twisted and furious.

The man turns, but Bucky doesn’t catch what happens next: one of the agents finally notices him and takes a swing at his head with a knife. Bucky ducks it, surging back into action with a new urgency. He takes one down with a shot to the head, topples another to the floor, his teeth bared and the agent snarling right back. Off to his right, another agent falls heavily, and Bucky hears more than sees Steve rush past him: he doesn’t look around, but he can tell from the noises behind him that Steve’s gone for the man at the back of the room, the one guarding Amanda. He can hear Amanda, too, shouting at the man, angry words that blend into the general din. He thinks, viciously: _good._ They haven’t silenced her yet.

Bucky focuses, then, on the agents in front of him: unsteady, exhausted, but fighting like he hasn’t in years. Not since Schmidt on that goddamn plane—but it’s a little like saving the world, isn’t it, saving this one person who never deserved to be here? It’s the brutality of that, the awful unfairness, that drives him on, dropping one agent after another. There’s blood on his hands so he tightens his grip on his gun and turns back, ready for the last one—but he’s already gone, or almost gone, lying still on the floor. Bucky lunges over him, toward Steve and the guard, still locked in combat halfway between him and Amanda. Amanda: watching the scene with wide eyes, pressed back against the wall. She doesn’t look at Bucky, hardly seems to know he’s there. A gun goes off, shatteringly loud, and Amanda screams—a choked-off sound of horror, one hand flinching to cover her mouth.

For a moment, Bucky thinks she’s been hurt—punished, somehow, like Steve had feared. He’s running toward her, angling past the other two, nothing in his head except that they can’t have come so close for her to be taken by some stray bullet, not now—but something’s wrong; she hasn’t moved; the only blood on her hands is dry; it was there before.

It’s Steve, he sees then, stumbling back from the agent. Bent nearly double, his hands pressed against his stomach, an awful muffled groan reaching Bucky. Clearly visible, even in the too-bright chaos: blood shining where it spatters on the concrete floor.

The agent turns the gun on Bucky now and he dodges, panic clawing at his throat. He blocks the man’s second shot and springs away again, but the agent follows; Bucky can’t turn or even look around. “Steve—?” he calls out, desperate—everything in him burning in sudden agonizing fear—

“‘M fine,” Steve grits out, the words choking off.

He’s alive, Bucky thinks: fervent, like a prayer. He doesn’t know where Steve got hit, but he can hear the sound of pained breaths drawn through clenched teeth behind him, the ragged edge of the noise slicing Bucky down to the bone—and he flinches back from the guard, his distraction nearly earning himself a knife to the ribs. He growls wordlessly, something in his face making the man go pale. He catches the blade on his sleeve—feels the bite of it in the flesh of his arm—and then the man yanks the gun from Bucky’s other hand, flips it around, and whips him across the face with it.

Bucky reels back, his vision momentarily blacking out. When he can see again, the guard is at the wall, pressing his hand against the flat surface—no, holding something against it. Bucky stalks toward him, weaponless and past caring. There’s a grinding noise under the deafening panic in Bucky’s ears, and the wall behind the man moves, concrete sliding smoothly aside to reveal an opening—

“Fuck,” Bucky snarls, breaking into a run. It’s not anger propelling him, no—fear, that they’ll lose their chance, that he won’t reach the man in time—even as he thinks it, the man turns and slips into the widening gap behind him, charging off down the hidden tunnel. Bucky slams his shoulder into the side of the opening as he chases the man through: running over the concrete floor, his boots and the man’s frantic steps a strangely even rhythm, reaching out in half-darkness but his fingers close on nothing—he shouts in frustration and it echoes back to him—

And then he stumbles and stops, braces his hands on his knees, breathing so hard it feels like swallowing glass. He stops, everything in him screaming to keep going—and he could, he knows he could; he’s run farther and faster; he could catch the guard, bring him down—but he can hear Steve’s voice, echoing down the tunnel behind him, calling out. The sound shoots through him, jolts him back to his aching body.

The footsteps ahead of him are fading. Other sounds reach him, a clanging metal noise, something heavy shifting. Some desperate part of Bucky insists that he should give chase, just around the next bend in the tunnel, or the one after that, or—but he turns, dizzy and shaking. Turns toward Steve’s voice with his pulse thundering in his ears, the fight still burning in his veins. They’re waiting for him, he thinks, Steve and Amanda—he can’t leave them.

He goes as quickly as he can, back up the tunnel and into the light. There’s an instinct to flinch as he passes through the doorway back into the room, an expectation of attack—but all he sees is Amanda, staring at him from her position by the wall, and Steve, hunched over on his knees. Regret seeping through him, now: not that he let the guard go, but that he ran after in the first place. That he left the others here to suffer, even just for a moment.

Noises are reaching him now that he hadn’t heard before: thuds and yells from the hall, his own panting breaths. Steve tamping down on another moan. He’s got both hands clamped against his stomach, a dark, wet stain spreading over his shirt. But when Bucky takes a step toward him, he shakes his head, his face twisted in pain. “I’m fine,” he says again through clenched teeth. “Go—help her.”

It’s painful to turn away, some unknown and hitherto-unnoticed injury aching in Bucky’s ankle as he steps back, and something else wrenches in his gut at the prospect of leaving Steve there on the floor. But he does it: he obeys, walks over the smears of gore, past the agents’ bodies, toward Amanda. She’s chained to the wall, he sees now, her wrists raw under the manacles, her feet linked together. She watches him approach, wary like a spooked dog, or maybe he’s the dog: he feels like it, like a feral thing, but he makes himself as gentle as he can, holds his hands up. “That’s our team fighting out there,” he says, jerking his head back toward the hall, the sounds of combat. “We’re gonna get you out.” He takes another step and her eyes follow him. “I won’t hurt you,” he says, “I’m just gonna get you out of this.”

She hesitates, swallows hard. “He’s got the keys,” she says then, nodding at one of the agents on the floor. “In his pocket.”

So Bucky goes back and bends over the man. He looks down at him and can barely make out his face under the blood. He’s unconscious, unrecognizable. He almost doesn’t want to touch him: a strange queasiness, at this point, but violent in its intensity. The keys are where they’re supposed to be.

“Is he dead?” Amanda asks as he pulls them out of the pocket.

Bucky hesitates, then puts his fingers against the man’s throat. The pulse there is stronger than Bucky would expect, stronger than he’d like. Blood bubbles at the corner of the man’s mouth as he breathes. “No,” Bucky says, drawing his hand away. He gets up again and comes back to Amanda, and she holds out her wrists to him. “Do you want him to be?” He’d do it, he thinks, for her: damn whatever’s fracturing inside of him, he’ll kill the bastard.

She’s looking past him to the agent and he can see the hatred in her eyes, not flinching from his mangled face. “No,” she says. “Well—yeah.” The manacles fall away and she takes the key from him, bending to unchain her ankles. “But he deserves worse than that.” He can’t see her face, but he can hear the bitterness in her voice. She steps out of the fetters and shakes her head at the supporting hand he offers to her. Instead, she limps over to the agent and looks down at him, blood trickling down the fingers of her right hand and onto the floor. She spits on him.

There’s a clatter in the hall and Bucky turns, his muscles seizing in alarm, acutely aware that he doesn’t even have a knife now—but it’s Sam and Natasha who stagger in, their weapons drawn. There’s a moment of fraught silence, and then Sam says, “Oh,” and Natasha says, in an unsteady voice, “All clear.” Amanda recoils from them, stumbling a bit, relaxing somewhat when Natasha flashes her a tentative smile.

“We should go,” Steve says from the floor. He tries to get up but falls back with a whimper.

The sound stabs at Bucky and he goes, at last, to Steve, who doesn’t protest this time. Hauls him up, his spent muscles quaking under the strain, but then they’re both standing and it’s easier to support his weight. “Think you can walk?” he asks.

Steve huffs, indignant. “Of course I can walk.” But his face is pale, the blood on his hands a striking red. He jerks his head toward the agent, now stirring faintly on the floor. “What are we gonna do with him?”

Bucky catches the look Amanda throws him, a pleading, warning look, and knows what she’s asking. “We’ll bring him in,” he says. When he turns to Sam and Natasha, though, he knows they can’t take him with them: no one can carry him, not with their injuries and exhaustion.

“He’s alive?” Sam asks, looking quickly between Bucky, Amanda, and the prone agent. Bucky nods. “We can tie him up,” he says, firm, already moving forward, beckoning to Natasha, who follows him.

Amanda backs off as they approach. She watches as they drag the man over to the chains in the wall, the key still in the cuffs, and shackle his wrists. “There was—another one,” she says, looking back to Bucky, another question in her eyes, this one not as clear.

“A guard,” Bucky explains to Sam and Natasha, then looks back to Amanda. He can’t help but admit it: “I let him go. I couldn’t—” Steve, at his side, is watching him, so closely it’s almost disconcerting, as are the other three. “I had to come back.” He wants to fall to his knees before her, suddenly, and tell her that he tried—that he had to choose. That he doesn’t know if it was right, but it would have been wrong to leave her here.

“He wasn’t a guard,” Amanda says. Her gaze rakes over the room, lingering on the bodies, the cuffed agent. “These were the guards. He was—” She blinks, falls silent.

Steve’s breath is rough and uneven, but his voice is steady when he says, “He was your handler.”

She doesn’t answer, just stands in the middle of the room, her shoes covered in the blood that coats the floor. She’s shivering, Bucky sees, her clothes stained and ripped in places, but he doesn’t think it’s cold that’s making her shake. Natasha takes a step toward her, hesitant. “He won’t get far,” she says, an iron certainty in her voice that Bucky knows well. “We’ll stop him.”

Amanda looks at her, still trembling. “I know you,” she says. “From—the trials.”

Natasha nods. “We’re here to get you home,” she says, suddenly sounding softer than Bucky’s ever heard her before. “There’s no one else here now.”

Even to Bucky’s eyes, Natasha looks terrifying, covered in blood as they all are; even with her hands empty, she’s a weapon. He would understand if Amanda didn’t believe it, if she thought they were just the next stage of the nightmare. But after a moment, she nods once as if deciding something, and squares her shoulders with what looks like an enormous effort. “That’s the quickest way out,” she says, her voice thin but unwavering, nodding toward the tunnel the guard—no, handler, Bucky corrects himself with a renewed swoop of horror—had revealed. “It’s how they brought me in.”

They file inside, Natasha first, then Amanda, then Bucky with Steve shuffling along next to him, and Sam bringing up the rear guard. He can tell Steve’s trying to put as much weight on his own feet as he can, but his breathing is ragged through his teeth. Bucky adds his own hand to the pressure over Steve’s wound, but the longer they walk down the tunnel, the more afraid he becomes: of the lag in Steve’s steps, the pained noises he makes every yard or so, the silence that is even worse. They’ve passed the spot where Bucky gave up the chase.

And then Steve takes a deep breath and says, his voice tight, “Your mother’s looking for you.” The lights are dimmer here, not so harsh as the rest of the base, but Bucky can see Amanda startle. She doesn’t stop, but she looks back. “They’ve been searching for—weeks,” Steve says, and sucks in another breath. “It’s been on the news.”

Amanda’s face is half in darkness, glancing over her shoulder at them. “I know,” she says. “They’d make me watch it. Said everyone was looking in the wrong places.”

Bucky swallows hard. He thinks back—it’s a month, just about, that she’s been in captivity, shuttled from one hiding place to another. He takes in the shadow of Steve’s face beside him, the shine of his eyes in the gloom, and he feels every ache, suddenly so tired he could lie down and crumble to dust in this tunnel.

“Not everyone,” Steve says, his voice quiet but full of fire.

They reach a break in the tunnel: it looks like a dead end, and then Bucky sees the ladder built into the final wall, narrow metal rungs welded to the concrete and marching up and out of sight. “Stay here,” Natasha says, and starts climbing. “I’ll make sure it opens.”

There’s quiet, then, when she’s gone. Amanda tilts her head back, peering up into the darkness after her. “When they first brought me here,” she says, “I jumped off the ladder and landed on one of them. Almost killed him.” Her voice is strange, a little uncertain, as if she can’t decide how to feel about it. “That’s when they put the chains on my feet.”

It’s Sam who speaks into the silence that follows. “That’s incredible,” he says. There’s a warmth in the words, a fierce pride.

Amanda takes a shaky breath. Before she can reply, though, there’s a clank from above and a muffled curse. Bucky startles and reaches for his empty belt as Sam draws his gun, clearly also thinking of an ambush—and then Natasha swings down into sight and drops to the floor. “It won’t open,” she says. “It’s stuck—or locked. The bastard must’ve blocked it from the other side. We’ll have to go back through the base to open it.”

“Back through—?” It’s almost more than Bucky can fathom, hauling Steve, as injured as he is, through all those tunnels, through the house and up out of the valley. And for Amanda, he imagines, it would be nothing short of hell to walk through the carnage.

It’s Sam who volunteers to go with Natasha, leaving Bucky with the other two—in, he’s sure, the capacity of guard, in case the agents aren’t as dead as they’d seemed. There’s enough light at this end of the tunnel to see by, though it’s weak and a sickly bluish-white, illuminating Sam and Natasha as they walk away and round the corner.

When their footsteps fade away, the only sound left is their breathing: Amanda’s, shallow and shaking, and Steve’s, rough, gritted out through his teeth. Bucky guides him back to lean against the wall, and Steve goes along with it, barely seeming to notice. For a moment Bucky’s afraid it’s blood loss or some other unknown injury making him so compliant, but then he sees Steve’s just distracted. He’s watching Amanda, who shifts her weight uncertainly a couple yards away and avoids Steve’s gaze.

Bucky knows what Steve wants to ask, and knows why he won’t ask it: he’s afraid, too, of what the answer might be. But they need to know. “Are you injured?” Bucky asks, and she startles at the sudden echo of his voice, coarsened by the fight. “What did they do to you?”

She looks down at herself as if she isn’t sure of the answer. “I’m—my ankle’s twisted.” The words are quick and choppy, like she has to force them out. “And they—they—”

As she struggles to speak, Steve’s hand, the one not pressed over the wound in his stomach, grips Bucky’s so tightly the bones feel like they’re fusing together. “Did they drug you?” he asks. “Did they—inject you with anything?”

Amanda nods. “At first, yeah. So I wouldn’t know where I was.” She chokes on whatever she wants to say next and shudders. “And then—but I—I don’t know,” she says, pressing a hand to her mouth, “what else they gave me.”

Bucky’s stomach churns. Steve, at his side, looks as sick as Bucky feels, his face twisted with pain and something else. He can hear Amanda struggling to control her breathing, panic in the sound, and he’s afraid he’s frightened her—but he doesn’t know how to change it. He doesn’t know how to do this, he thinks; hell, Romanoff was right. He can’t even tell her it’ll be all right, because he doesn’t know if it will be. “Okay,” he says, making his voice calmer, hoping it’ll steady her as well. “It’s okay if you don’t know.”

She stares at him. At both of them, huddled together, like they’re a strange animal that could bite at any moment. “They told me—” She’s almost whispering, the barest thread of sound, and she’s clearly fighting to get each syllable out, but she does, bit by bit. “They told me they were going to—to use me. They said—” She stops, shakes her head.

Steve shifts against the wall, against Bucky’s hands. There’s the edge of a groan in his breath as he moves. “They said they’d make you into a weapon,” he says, his voice too soft for the words. “Make you strong.”

“How did you know?” Amanda breathes.

“The people who took you,” Steve says, “they had me too. For a long time.” Gritting his teeth: “They made me into their—their dog. Their gun.”

She’s looking at Steve now, taking him in. The size of him, the metal arm glinting in the dim light. Bucky knows what’s coming a second before she speaks. “You were in D.C.,” she says. It’s almost a question, like she’s afraid to make it true.

Steve shudders; Bucky can feel the pain roll through him, muscles spasming under his hands. “I was there,” Steve says. “But I was—I wasn’t—” He gulps a breath in; forces it out. “They made me do things I didn’t—things I shouldn’t have done.” He looks away from Amanda, turning his head aside. “They had me for a long time,” he says again.

Bucky tries to meet his eyes, in the silence that follows, but he can’t; Steve’s watching the floor. There are flecks of blood in his hair, Bucky sees, and slides his hand up to the nape of Steve’s neck, brushing his fingers through the strands there. He doesn’t know what to say—to either of them, he realizes. This isn’t something he can fix; he doesn’t have the words.

And then Amanda swallows, an audible click in the quiet tunnel. “They were going to do that to me,” she says. This time it isn’t a question.

Steve nods, the movement close to a flinch. “They would’ve tried,” he says.

Bucky watches his face contort, drawing tight around the eyes—guilt, if he had to guess, because he thinks Steve feels the same way he does: that it would’ve been better if one of them had taken the pain for her; that, defying the impossibility of it, they _should_ have. It’s a savage, selfish feeling, and it scrapes him raw inside. “They won’t be able to now,” he says, looking over to Amanda, seeing her eyes snap to him.

“But—the h-handler.” Stumbling over the word, like it could cut her. “He got away.”

And: there it is. Like a blow to the kneecaps. Bucky opens his mouth but nothing comes out. He clears his throat. “I’m sorry,” he tries. “I should have—”

Steve’s hand firm, suddenly, pressing against Bucky’s spine: not in warning but in comfort. “He won’t get far,” he says, the same words Natasha had used, but without the harshness. “And we found their other cells. The lab where they kept you—other places, where they would’ve taken you.” A quiet finality: “We destroyed them.”

Watching Amanda, Bucky can see her trying to believe it. He knows firsthand the doubt—the fear—heels digging in, terrified of being tricked; it’s better to stay in the dark than have the world ripped away from you again. When Steve had pulled him off that table, Bucky’d asked if he was dreaming and he’d meant it—it hadn’t seemed real, not just Steve’s transformation but the very idea of rescue, of an end to the nightmare. He can see Amanda trying to puzzle it out, testing the ice. “I didn’t think,” she says, slowly, “that anyone would find me. But you did.” She’s looking at Steve with a strange, fierce expression. “Thank you.”

Steve shrinks from her gaze. “I’m not,” he starts, fumbling, “I—I did a lot of other things for them, first. Terrible things.” He shakes his head. “I wouldn’t be here without—what they trained me to do. What I did.”

“But—you are here.” Still with that intense look in her eyes, hungry almost. Like she still doesn’t quite trust it, but she’s going to try. “They did that to you,” she says, “and you—took it and you—destroyed them with it. Because of it.” She swallows hard. “And you got me out, too.”

“I don’t think it’s that simple,” Steve says. Whispers, really. Clinging to Bucky, trembling very finely; his eyes on Amanda like she’ll vanish if he looks away. Like she’s saying something he’s afraid to hear.

“It is to me,” Amanda says. Desperate, not so much believing her own words as needing them to be true.

Steve takes a breath, so sharply it’s almost as if he’s been hit with another bullet, wrenching back slightly against Bucky’s body. He makes an aborted movement, something that might be a nodding or bowing his head, his hand coming up as if to cradle it, and then—a clang, a soft yelp of fright—the warm, clear light of the sun illuminates the end of the tunnel and Amanda, standing there blinking.

It takes a moment for Bucky to realize it’s Natasha and Sam, looking down through the door at the top of the ladder, their heads silhouetted against the sky. Bucky forces himself to relax, then, but the tension doesn’t go out of Steve’s body—he’s not flinching at the noise, Bucky realizes; he’s stumbling, trying to regain his balance and slipping each time. “Steve?” he asks, seeing in the sunlight the shocking red of the blood on both their hands, the pallor of Steve’s face.

Steve breathes out through his teeth. Claws his way to upright against Bucky’s shoulder—leaning heavily on him, but standing. “It’s okay,” he says, swaying close to Bucky’s ear. And then again, to Amanda: “It’s okay.”

She looks at him, wordless, apparently as horrified as Bucky at the scope of the wound; it doesn’t look like she realized, before, just how serious it is. But whatever she sees in Steve’s face must decide her; she tilts her face up toward the light, squinting.

Natasha calls down, “You need help getting up?”

In answer, Amanda starts climbing.

“You’re not gonna make that,” Bucky predicts, feeling how much of Steve’s weight he’s supporting.

Steve sets his jaw. “I’ll have to.”

Though the ladder isn’t very tall, it takes several long minutes until they’re all at the top. Bucky pulls Steve up and onto the grass, and both of them stagger a few steps before Steve finds his balance. He’s blinking in the sunlight, his hand holding so tight to Bucky’s shoulder that it will definitely bruise, but his eyes are clear as he looks around—and then Bucky looks, too, and sees where they are. It’s a hilltop, bright in the noon sun, wind whipping at their clothes, and in the valley to the west Bucky can see the ranch, the pitted ground in front of the house, the rusting gate. Amanda, too, is staring, tear tracks cutting clean paths through the dirt on her face.

The road, Bucky knows, is somewhere to the east; their car, too. He takes a steadying breath and pulls Steve closer, presses his hand back over the wound in his gut. Winces, when Steve grunts. “C’mon,” Bucky murmurs. “Just a little bit farther, and you can sit down.”

“Jesus, Rogers,” Natasha says, looking back at Bucky’s words from where she leads the group. “You look like death.”

Steve gives a wheezy chuckle, his mouth pulling up on one side. “You should see the other guy.”

Natasha rolls her eyes and keeps walking, and Bucky tightens his grip around Steve’s waist. If he’s lucid enough to make jokes, then Bucky thinks, or hopes, that he’ll heal up all right—but they’ve barely gone ten more yards before Steve mumbles, “Buck—” and stumbles and folds, landing heavily on his knees, dragging Bucky with him.

“Hey,” Bucky says, twisting as they go down—

“It’s okay,” Steve says, “I just need a minute, just—” He swallows. “Just a minute.”

Bucky doesn’t know how to tell Steve that he’s lost his mind, so he looks away. The other three have stopped again, Sam bracing his hands on his knees, Natasha shielding her face against the wind. “Keep going,” he tells them, nodding toward the slope down into the next valley. “Get out of here—get Amanda into town.”

“Leave without us if you need to,” Steve adds. “We’ll follow.”

They’re still hesitating. “There could be reinforcements,” Sam points out. “That agent could be hanging around.”

“I got backup, too,” Steve says. He’s already listing sideways, halfway into Bucky’s lap, but he manages to nudge Bucky with his elbow all the same.

Natasha exchanges a look with Sam, then hands Bucky her gun. She turns away—they all do—and they continue down the hill. Bucky sees Sam offer a hand to Amanda as they hit the steep descent, and this time she takes it.

He looks back to Steve, whose brow is furrowed in pain. “Well?” he demands, making his voice rougher to hide how it shakes. “You ever had worse than this one before?”

“Uh—a couple times. Not often.” Steve twitches through a shudder. “I think I’d prefer a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, though.”

Bucky sighs and takes off his jacket, ripping away the bloodiest parts of it. “You’re a goddamn punk, Rogers,” he says, and pries Steve’s hands away, presses the fabric against the wound.

Steve laughs even as he gasps and grips Bucky’s wrist hard, as if he wants to shove him away—but he doesn’t. Bucky can see him fight with the pain and swallow it down. “Christ,” Steve says, “would you stop looking at me like that? I’m—”

“If you say _fine—”_

“I wasn’t gonna.” Steve’s hand shifts on Bucky’s, both of them holding the jacket in place now. “But I’m not dying, Buck. We—we made it out.” He’s looking at Bucky, his face pale under the blood and dust, but he’s looking at Bucky and his eyes are clear. “We all made it out.” A chuckle that sounds like it hurts. “I wasn’t sure we would.”

Bucky lets himself tilt forward, leaning his forehead against Steve’s. “‘Course we did,” he says, easily, like his gut didn’t twist with the same fear he hears in Steve’s voice, the same fear he’s fallen into like a reflex for what feels like centuries. He takes in a breath so big his lungs can’t hold all of it. He thinks of Amanda, walking under the sun, of Sam and Natasha, leading her back to safety.

Steve blinks back at him, rocking into the touch. This close, his face fractures into separate parts: eyes, mouth, nose. There’s pain in his features, but it seems far away. “Hey,” Steve says to him, quiet, almost lost in the wind even though they’re barely four inches apart.

“Hey,” Bucky replies. He smiles, helpless, his throat closing up when he sees how Steve’s looking at him, the way the light plays on his face. He looks—in the light, he looks—young. His eyes the same blue as the sky, the wind tugging at them both. “Stevie,” he starts, and shakes his head, skin against skin. He isn’t sure what he wants to say—what words would be enough.

Steve reaches out and puts his bloodstained fingers, feather-light, under Bucky’s chin. “I’m here,” he says, soft and close. “We’re both right here.”

Relief breaks over Bucky like a wave and he closes his eyes against the tightness in his throat. Steve shifts his hand to rest on his shoulder, and though Bucky knows it’s for Steve’s own support, it steadies him, too. He opens his eyes and sees Steve smiling back, and kisses him, gentle as he can. It tastes of dust and sweat; they’re both filthy. But he lets himself feel it, lingering in each second as if it might be stolen from them, all the sweeter knowing that it won’t: the solid warmth, the press of Steve’s hand, the hitch in his breath. There’s a wash of dizziness as Bucky takes it in, like standing on a cliff and looking down. But he doesn’t think it’s fear, really. He can walk away from the cliff now.

And then Steve breaks away with a wince and a breathless chuckle. “Maybe we should wait on that till the bullet’s out, at least.”

“Shouldn’t be too long,” Bucky murmurs. “You heal faster than I do.” But he can see how much it still hurts. With one hand still putting pressure on the wound, he raises his other to brush Steve’s hair back. Steve leans into the touch, closes his eyes.

Bucky loses count of the minutes. He would stay here, he thinks, forever, in the sun with Steve next to him. But they don’t: they get up, Steve unsteady but trying hard not to show it, and Bucky pulls him close again. They make their slow way down the hill and into the valley.

Sure enough, halfway up the next slope Steve shudders and cries out worse than before. He doubles over, breathing hard, his hand pressed against the wound in his side, and then—he takes his hand away and holds it out palm-up, something glinting wetly there. The bullet, Bucky sees, slick with blood, shining in the sun. “Goddamn,” Steve says. He lets it drop into the grass. Bucky replaces the jacket over the wound and they keep going: up the hill and over it, the road in the next valley stretching out like a river before them.

———

**CODA**

Natasha’s food is getting cold, but she’s not showing any signs of coming back inside: her phone pressed to her ear, tugging on a lock of hair as she gazes vaguely into the distance. Bucky watches her for a moment more, then turns back to Sam stealing one of the fries off of her plate. “Careful,” he says. “Pretty sure she knows more ways to kill you than I do to save you.”

Sam snorts around the fry. “Are you saying you _would_ save me? I’m touched, Barnes.”

“Only so you’d owe me one.” Bucky grins at him with teeth.

“Did you hear that?” Sam turns to Steve. “One evil plot foiled and he thinks he’s hot shit.”

Steve reaches out to take one of Natasha’s fries as well. “We are hot shit,” he says seriously.

It startles a laugh out of Sam. Bucky laughs too, watching him—and watching Steve, who doesn’t so much as wink. There’s a flicker at the corner of his mouth, though, as he glances at Bucky, and for a moment—overlaid, the diner transforming into a smoky dance hall, faint strains of brass in the air—he’s that spitfire again, too-big suspenders and an even bigger mouth. Unafraid of the world because he hadn’t yet seen it. The moment passes, then, the diner reasserting itself with all of its grease and black coffee, but a hint remains, like an afterglow. An ease to Steve’s shoulders, a lightness in his eyes.

Half a minute later, Natasha walks back in, not looking up from her phone until she’s sitting down again. She pulls her plate toward herself and starts eating, either unaware of or unbothered by her diminished pile of french fries.

“What was that?” Sam asks, propping his elbow on the table. “Did Senator Bailey promise you a second presidential pardon?”

“Fury,” Natasha replies blandly. “Says he’s got some work if we want it.” Bucky doesn’t miss the dubious look Sam gives her, but she shakes her head. “I said not yet. We’ve still got plenty to do. And first, anyway—” Her mouth pulls up at one corner, sharp. “Tracking down that agent that got away.”

Bucky hadn’t forgotten the handler, but the reminder sends a cold shiver down his spine. Steve’s hand presses into his under the table, threading their fingers together.

And Natasha’s looking at them across the table, fiddling with a sugar packet in a way that would be casual if not for the intensity in her gaze. “The sooner we get started,” she says, “the less of a lead he’ll have. You two in?”

Bucky swallows. There’s no doubt, not really, but—he hadn’t been lying, when he’d told Natasha that the fighting was like inertia after so long. Running for so many years, it had felt as if the ground would open and swallow him up if he stopped. And he’s so tired, but—it’s harder than he thought it’d be, now, to say it.

It’s Steve who answers, his thumb rubbing a gentle circle against the back of Bucky’s hand. “I don’t think so,” he says. “I think it’s time for us to try something else.”

The news isn’t a surprise to Natasha, Bucky knows, so he’s watching Sam. Watching him look from Bucky to Steve, slow and measuring, rubbing a thoughtful hand over his mouth. Then he lowers it. “We could use your help,” he says.

He turns his gaze back to Bucky, and Bucky meets his eyes and sees him smiling slightly. It’s a serious offer, he thinks—but not one Sam really expected them to take. Bucky shakes his head, letting out a breath he hadn’t meant to hold. “Nah,” he says, easy. “You two are plenty dangerous on your own.”

Sam’s smile grows as he settles back in his seat. He steals another of Natasha’s fries. “What’s next, then?” he asks, snatching his hand back as she swats at it. “You two gonna—drive to LA, open up a seaside café?”

“Don’t tempt me,” Bucky says, laughing. Steve catches his eye, though, as Natasha makes some dry remark about tourist traps. Just a half-second’s glance, a crinkling at the corner of his eyes, and Bucky thinks—maybe. Not what Sam suggested, but—a house in a city they’ve never been to, somewhere with green things growing up through the cracks in the sidewalks. Or in the country, maybe, someplace they can watch the rain roll in. Like some far-away dream, thinking of rain in this long, dry summer, but Bucky knows it’ll come. He can almost touch it now.

**Author's Note:**

> The playlist for the fic can be found [here](https://blanketed-in-stars.tumblr.com/post/630137433617481728/long-is-the-road-that-leads-me-home-a) if you're interested!
> 
> Most driving distances are fudged and I don't know how guns work.
> 
> Thank you for reading <3


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